IRENE CAUSED CATASTROPHIC BOX OFFICE WEEKEND?

Okay, so over a thousand theatres shut down, but in its third week “The Help” still managed to rake in $14.3 million.

Enough people who wanted to see “The Help” saw “The Help.”

How did that happen?

MTV’S VIDEO MUSIC AWARDS WERE ON LAST NIGHT

Why am I just hearing about this now? It is a much-anticipated ritual in the Nolte household that we enjoy ignoring  this obnoxious awards telecast every year, but how are we supposed to enjoy not-watching if we have no idea it’s on?

Get your publicity act together, MTV. Thanks for nothing.

MPAA RELEASES ‘FACT SHEET’ ON COST OF PIRACY

Among other startling  numbers released: 140,000 active links pop up daily that infringe on copyright laws; 6 million people saw “Hurt Locker” in the theatre while 7 million saw it as an illegal download.

Wow.

As right-of-center folks constantly under assault by Hollywood it’s easy to look the other way or even enjoy the damage piracy does to an industry that doesn’t like us very much, but it’s still theft — outright theft.

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Hollywood, during its Golden Age, was a dream machine spinning images of adventure, glamour, and most of all, romance.

MGM’s roster of female stars constituted the greatest collection of beautiful and talented women the world has ever known.

One of the greatest was Ava Gardner.

Ava Gardner in “The Killers,” her breakthrough role, 1946.

As an emerging starlet in the early 1940’s, before she made a single movie the breathtaking Southern beauty was the talk of the town.

Mickey Rooney was MGM’s golden boy, a versatile star equally adept at musicals, comedy and drama. His signature role as the small-town youngster Andy Hardy made him something of a cash cow for the studio. The Hardy movies were cheap to produce and earned enormous profits.

In his compulsively readable autobiography, Life is Too Short, Rooney claims that his mother worked as a prostitute in order to put food on the table during the depths of the Depression. Thus, it’s not surprising that Rooney pursued women with an obsessive compulsion, seeking affection and love in all the wrong places: call girls, ambitious actresses and mature women—including Irving Thalberg’s widow Norma Shearer—smitten by Rooney’s brash boyish charm. (more…)

“I’m a lady who likes to fight, and I think women would go into the trenches tomorrow if they could.”  –Elizabeth Taylor

In 1947, 15-year-old Elizabeth Taylor told off her boss, MGM head honcho Louis B. Mayer, arguably the most powerful man in Hollywood, for being mean to her mother.  She left the mogul’s office crying, fully convinced she was going to get fired.  It turned out she was wrong and after a few weeks the young actress recognized that she was a valuable commodity and by fighting she could get often get her way.

Early on Elizabeth realized her looks let her get away with a lot.  In her twenties she delighted in belching loudly in public knowing that others would think that there was no way such an uncouth noise could come from someone that beautiful. Another weapon in her arsenal washer use of maladies both real and imagined.  After playing a sickly teenager in the drama Cynthia (1947), people around her noticed if she found working conditions unfavorable she would become incapacitated. She came down with abdominal pains after her co-star James Dean shockingly died in a car crash during the filming of the western Giant (1955) and was hospitalized for two weeks.

Likewise when her lover and leading man Richard Burton announced he was reconciling with his long suffering wife Sybil while making Cleopatra (1963) Elizabeth reportedly took an overdose of sleeping pills.  Her bosses fumed, production was shut down, and then she recovered and eventually landed her man. Elizabeth had little sympathy for studio executives; after charging Jack Warner $1,000,000 for starring in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), she nearly fired her agent for agreeing to a contract that required her to show up at work before 10am (it was renegotiated to her liking), and then asked the startled Warner for an expensive diamond brooch on top of her salary (he found her request brazen and unwarranted but eventually complied). 

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[Part one of this two-part series can be found here.]

Sixteen of the top 20 box office earners have either a G or PG rating which should be a clue that R rated films ( “Titanic” being the exception) don’t do as well yet studios continue to add gratuitous irrelevant sex scenes that ruin the film. Why? It certainly can’t be artistic license because the principal reaction to them is usually-‘Ew!!! Why did they do that?” 

Movie-going statistics have dropped significantly among older adults and that’s understandable since most fare today cater to hormonal adolescents without a clue as to the true appeal of sensual art. Yet senior citizens today are former film buffs who would relish worthy theatrical offerings but their treks back to the wide screen lonely leave them disappointed. 

A few years ago I went with an elderly friend to see, “Love Actually,” because we’re both great fans of Alan Rickman. The film has various vignettes of romantic couples and their curious experiences pursuing the love game. One of these couples happens to be two individuals acting in a porn movie and although the intent was to inject irony in the sex scenes showing the relative naïveté of the participants as they try to hook up, it failed miserably. My friend later said that particular graphic display spoiled the otherwise charming film which she no longer would add to her DVD collection when it came out.  (more…)

The men and women who earn the right to wear eagle, globe and anchor of the United States Marine Corps are a special breed.   To those outside the Corps, they talk funny.  They look funny.  They are extremely impressed with themselves – and they have every right to be. 

My beloved United States Army is a blunt instrument, a magnificent club that has pummels our nation’s enemies into submission.  But the Marines are America’s rapier, a razor sharp weapon of war that has never been bested and never will be.  For over two centuries, the United States Marine Corps has been fighting our country’s battles in the air, on land and sea.  They don’t give up.  They don’t quit.  There’s no word for retreat in a Marine’s vocabulary.  And they are making history even today in the mountains of Afghanistan and elsewhere.

November 10th is the Corps’ 234th birthday.  With the indulgence of my Devil Dog brethren, here is this Army veteran’s countdown of the Top Ten Marine Corp movies: (more…)

There have been liberal movies stars for as long as there have been movie stars. The list of left-of-center Golden Age-era giants is a mile long. My admiration for an actor has ZERO to do with personal politics, but as Skip Press pointed out in his terrific piece last week, class is a big factor. Many of the greats didn’t share my beliefs, but few ever went out of their way to hurl insults at me and mine, either. Undoubtedly, someone could Google up a statement that contradicts me, but I would argue in return that human beings slip, even big-screen immortals. What can’t be argued is that once upon a time movie stars walked the earth who defined themselves, not with elitist, flame-throwing political rhetoric, but with dignity and class.

 
Sinatra and Ava for Democrat Adlai Stevenson

Where classic Hollywood mostly held their activism to advocating for their causes, too many of today’s classless breed defines their activism through the hurling of invective at the other side - at 50% of the customers. They do it up on the screen and they do it while hiding behind a Hollywood media-machine owned and operated by sycophants who mostly agree. There’s nothing wrong with passion, humor, disagreement and debate, that’s what Big Hollywood is all about, but ad hominem that dehumanizes is the tactic of a new generation eager to fit in with the A-list.   (more…)

Ava Gardner, publicity photo for The Killers

The love affair—and I’m using that term loosely—between Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra was doomed from the start. Both stars were emotionally immature with little impulse control. Both were alcoholics, and both had a history of affairs with equally unstable partners.

And so The Voice and The Shape plunged into a tsunami of a relationship and a six-year marriage (1951 – 1957) punctuated by unbridled passion, threats of suicide, and metronomic doses of violence.

In Autumn of 1949 Gardner and Sinatra, not yet lovers, were both guests at the Palm Springs home of producer Darryl F. Zanuck. The liquor flowed, and the two stars locked in on each other like lethal missiles.

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5am PST – Show Boat (1951) – Riverboat entertainers find love, laughs and hardships as they sail along “Old Man River.” Cast: Kathryn Grayson, Ava Gardner, Howard Keel, Joe E. Brown Dir: George Sidney C-108 mins, TV-G

“Show Boat” is all about Ava Gardner, who was so much more than just a pretty face. Here, as the victim of racial prejudice, or films such as “On the Beach” and “Night of the Iguana,” she was able to put across a tragic-laced melancholy that transcended her beauty and added an entire dimension to a character without a word of exposition.  The above clip is a perfect example. Ava’s singing voice may be dubbed but she sells the moment like few others could. I gotta love one man till I die… (more…)