As always, the further we go back in Hollywood history, the more
that fact and legend become intertwined. It's hard to say where the truth
really lies.
February
20, 1972
Radio personality and newspaper columnist Walter
Winchell dies at the age of 74.
Winchell's
influential gossip and news show, Walter Winchell's Jergens Journal, ran
for 18 years.
Winchell
started as a vaudeville performer, working with an array of future stars,
including Eddie Cantor and George Jessel. He began writing about Broadway in
1922 for the Vaudeville News and in 1929 began writing a syndicated
column for the New York Daily Mirror, which ran for three decades. But
dishing on socialites became his claim to fame when he began his radio news
show in 1930. His fast-paced show was packed with short news and gossip
items-his rapid-fire radio prattle was clocked at 215 words a minute. Millions
of people tuned into his witty and extremely popular Sunday evening show, which
he introduced with, "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. North and South America
and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press!"
A gossip
columnist when few others existed, Winchell ruined more than a few careers with
reports that some maintained were sensationalistic, reckless, and actually
untrue. His show popularized catchphrases like "blessed event" and
"scram," and peers admired his penchant for finding fresh ways to report
on Hollywood's elite. Winchell starred as himself in several films, including Love
and Hisses in 1937 and Daisy Kenyon in 1947.
What some called captivating reporting was labeled
yellow journalism by others. His career declined in the 1950s. Like so many
other radio stars, Winchell's career lost its sparkle when Americans'
allegiance turned to television. Meanwhile, he made an unpopular decision to
back Senator Joseph McCarthy's "Red Scare," publicly accusing a
number of Hollywood stars of being communists. In the 1960s, the New York
Daily Mirror closed and his column ended. One of his last major jobs was
narrating "The Untouchables," a popular television drama series, from
1959 to 1963. When he died penniless in 1972, it was reported that just one
person-his daughter-showed up at his funeral.
February
23, 1997
Schindler's List is shown on NBC, the first network to
broadcast a movie without commercial interruption. Ford Motor Company, which sponsored the broadcast,
showed one commercial before and after the film.
The 1993
film about German factory owner Oskar Schindler, who saved the lives of Jewish
workers in his factory during World War II, was Spielberg's most ambitious
movie to date. The picture, filmed in black and white, won Spielberg his first
Academy Award as Best Director, and it also garnered Best Picture and Best
Adapted Screenplay awards. The film's screenplay, by Thomas Keneally and Steven
Zallian, was adapted from Keneally's novel, Schindler's Ark, published
in 1982.
Spielberg started making amateur films in his teens,
and by the late 1970s he had become heavily involved in production and
scriptwriting. He gained fame early in his career for directing such
blockbusters as Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the
Lost Ark, E.T., Poltergeist, and a string of other phenomenal successes. He
established his own independent production company, Amblin' Entertainment, in
1984, where he produced Gremlins, Back to the Future, Arachnophobia, Cape
Fear, and more. In 1994, he formed DreamWorks SKG with Jeffrey Katzenberg
and David Geffen, and the following year the trio announced a partnership with
Microsoft Corporation, called DreamWorks Interactive, which produced
interactive games and teaching tools. Just months before he released Schindler's
List, Spielberg released Jurassic Park, which featured
computer-generated dinosaurs that took the world by storm. He won his second
Academy Award for Best Director in 1999 for Saving Private Ryan.
Virtually all of Spielberg's films have been box office smashes.
To quote the Bicentennial
Minute, "And that's the way it was".
Stay Tuned
Tony Figueroa
No comments:
Post a Comment