April 3, 1953
"TV Guide" was
published for the first time. The cover was a photo of Lucille Ball's infant
Desiderio Alberto Arnaz IV.
April 4, 1973
NBC aired the Elvis Presley
movie "Aloha From Hawaii."
April 4, 2013
Legendary
movie critic Roger Ebert dies.
On this day in 2013, one of America's best-known and most influential movie critics, Roger Ebert, who reviewed movies for The Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and on TV for 31 years, dies at age 70 after a battling cancer. In 1975, Ebert started co-hosting a movie review program on TV with fellow critic Gene Siskel that eventually turned them both into household names and made their thumbs-up, thumbs-down rating system part of American pop culture.
Born on June 18, 1942, in Urbana, Illinois, Ebert was the
only child of an electrician father and bookkeeper mother. At age 15, Ebert he
began writing about high school sports for his local newspaper. In 1964, he
graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where majored in
journalism and served as editor of the school's newspaper. Two years later, he
went to work for the Chicago Sun-Times. When the paper's film critic retired in
1967, Ebert was named as her replacement.
Ebert's column soon became a must-read for movie
lovers, and in 1975 he became the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize.
That same year, he and rival critic Gene Siskel, of The Chicago Tribune, were
paired as co-hosts of a monthly movie-review show, "Opening Soon at a
Theater Near You," on Chicago’s public broadcasting station. In 1978, the
show, renamed "Sneak Previews," went into national syndication, and
later became the highest-rated half-hour series in the history of public
television. In the early 1980s, the program was acquired by another broadcasting company and
rechristened "At the Movies." Its name was changed to
"Siskel & Ebert at the Movies" in 1986, the same year the two
hosts, who became known for their sometimes contentious on-screen chemistry,
debuted their thumbs-up, thumbs-down judgments. The program helped turn
Siskel and Ebert into some of the planet's most powerful film critics as well
as celebrities in their own right. After Siskel died in 1999 at age 53 from a
brain tumor, Ebert selected his Sun-Times colleague Richard Roeper as his new
co-host and the program was rechristened "At the Movies with Ebert &
Roeper."
Ebert reportedly watched 500 movies a year and penned
reviews of at least half that many on an annual basis. (In 2012, when asked to
name the 10 greatest films of all time, his list included such titles as
"Apocalypse Now," "Citizen Kane," "Raging Bull"
and "Vertigo.") His work was syndicated in hundreds of newspapers
around the world, and he was the author of more than 15 books, including the
acclaimed 2011 memoir "Life Itself." Ebert had a brief foray into
movie making when he wrote the script for 1970’s "Beyond the Valley of the
Dolls." Upon its release, the film was trashed by critics, including
Siskel.
Diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2002 and salivary
gland cancer the following year, Ebert lost the ability to speak, drink and eat
in 2006 following surgery for jaw cancer. However, he continued to work,
writing for the Sun-Times, blogging for his own website and developing a large
following on Facebook and Twitter. On April 2, 2013, Ebert publicly announced
he would be writing fewer reviews due to a recurrence of cancer. He died two
days later. The Sun-Times published his final movie review on April 6, for
"To the Wonder." Ebert awarded it 3.5 out of 4 stars.
April 5, 2008
Charlton Heston dies at the age of 84.
With his leading-man status confirmed, Heston went on to star in other
notable films for Hollywood’s best directors. In 1958, he played a Mexican
narcotics detective in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, appearing
opposite Welles himself. Another biblical epic, Ben-Hur (1959),
directed by William Wyler, won a then-record 11 Academy Awards (a mark that was
later tied by Titanic in 1998 and The Lord of the Rings: The
Return of the King in 2004). Heston took home an Oscar for Best Actor for
his portrayal of a rebellious young aristocrat in ancient Judea.
In all, Heston would appear in some 100 movies on the big and small screens
over the course of his lengthy career. He played the title character in the
Spanish medieval epic El Cid (1961), opposite Sophia Loren, and was
panned by critics for his turn as Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy
(1965). He portrayed Mark Antony in both Julius Caesar (1970) and
Antony and Cleopatra (1973); he also directed the latter film. Heston
also made forays into the Western genre (1968’s Willy Penny), science
fiction (the 1968 hit The Planet of the Apes and its 1970 sequel,
1971’s Omega Man and 1973’s Soylent Green), and highbrow
literary adaptations (1972’s The Call of the Wild and 1973’s The
Three Musketeers). His later work for cable television included A Man
for All Seasons (1988) and The Avenging Angel (1995).
Long active in political and social causes, Heston publicly supported the
civil rights movement and participated in the historic march on Washington with
Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963. In 1966, Heston succeeded his friend and fellow
actor Ronald Reagan as president of the Screen Actors Guild, a post he would
hold until 1971. He also served as chairman of the American Film Institute from
1973 to 1983. After Reagan won the U.S. presidency in 1980, he appointed Heston
as the co-chairman of a task force on arts and humanities. In this role, Heston
defended National Endowment for the Arts and proved to be an effective speaker
and public figure.
According to his obituary in The New York Times, Heston switched
his political affiliation from Democrat to Republican in 1987, after the
Democrats blocked the Supreme Court appointment of Robert Bork, a conservative
whom Heston supported. Over the next decade, Heston began increasingly to speak
out about what he saw as a decline of morality in American popular culture and
entertainment. In 1996, he campaigned on behalf of various Republican candidates.
He began focusing specifically on the opposition to gun control. After being
elected vice president of the NRA in 1997, he became president the following
year.
Heston parlayed his rugged onscreen persona into a forceful role at the head
of the NRA’s campaign against what it saw as the federal government’s attempts
to encroach on the constitutional right to bear arms. In 2000, he made a
memorable speech at the NRA’s annual convention, bringing his audience to their
feet with the rousing claim that gun-control advocates would have to pry his
gun “from my cold, dead hands!” Meanwhile, Heston continued acting through the
1990s, making one of his final film appearances (uncredited) in Tim Burton’s
2001 remake of Planet of the Apes.
April 7, 1978
The final episode, number
37, of Black Sheep Squadron aired on
NBC.
Stay Tuned
Tony Figueroa
No comments:
Post a Comment