http://www.pugetsoundradio.com/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl? http://www.eblah.com en http://www.pugetsoundradio.com/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1370555574/ http://www.pugetsoundradio.com/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1370555574/#num1 Actress Esther Williams Dies at 91

10:10 AM PDT 6/6/2013
by Mike Barnes
HollywoodReporter.com


  
                                                                                                      [Gerald Smith/NBCU Photo Bank
                                                        Esther Williams in 1956.

The champion swimmer starred in such films as "Bathing Beauty," "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" and "Million Dollar Mermaid."


Actress and champion swimmer Esther Williams, who showcased a combination of glamour and athleticism by starring in several spectacular and splashy MGM musicals of the 1940s and '50s, has died. She was 91.

Williams died peacefully in her sleep Thursday in Beverly Hills, family spokesman Harlan Boll announced.

Williams swam her way to stardom in such timeless motion pictures as Bathing Beauty (1944), Neptune's Daughter (1949) and Million Dollar Mermaid (1952).

The audience response to the athletic All-American girl was phenomenal as MGM put Williams' career into high gear. For more than a decade, she reigned in a new Hollywood genre created just for her: The Aqua Musical.

A special 90-foot-square, 20-foot-deep pool was built at Stage 30 on the MGM lot, complete with hydraulic lifts, hidden air hoses and special camera cranes for overhead shots. Over the years, MGM concocted dozens of pretenses for getting her in water, calling on the great Busby Berkeley to design lavish production numbers to show off Williams' assets.

"No one had ever done a swimming movie before," she once said, "so we just made it up as we went along. I ad-libbed all my own underwater movements."

Bathing Beauty, a Technicolor dream that co-starred Basil Rathbone and Red Skelton, was the most successful film of 1944. Million Dollar Mermaid is renowned for its spectacular sequences that include fountains, flames and a spewing volcano. She learned to water-ski for the film.

Throughout her illustrious career, Williams swam more than 1,250 miles in 25 aqua musicals for MGM and continually proved that she was a champion in the pool and at the box office. Her name is synonymous with swimming.

"Esther Williams did more for a bathing suit than John Wayne ever did for a cowboy hat, Tom Mix for a horse, Errol Flynn for a sword, Ronald Colman for a pith helmet or Cary Grant for a tuxedo," the late Los Angeles Times sports columnist Jim Murray once wrote.

Like Norwegian ice skater Sonja Henie before her, Williams was one of the few female athletes to cross over to widespread entertainment success.

Williams was born Aug. 8, 1921, in Los Angeles, the fifth child of Lou and Bula Williams. She grew up swimming in playground pools and surfing at local beaches and got her first job at 8 counting towels at an Inglewood pool that her mother campaigned to have built for the neighborhood. She earned an hour of swimming for each 100 towels counted.

By age 14, she won a municipal swimming championship and was recruited by former Olympian Aileen Allen, the city's leading women's coach at the powerful Los Angeles Athletic Club who helped Williams develop her style.

She won the Women's Outdoor Nationals in the 100-meter freestyle, added crowns in the 100- and 50-meter breaststroke events and swam the anchor lap for the team that cut nine seconds off the world medley relay record.

By age 16, she represented the L.A. Athletic Club while earning three national championships in the breaststroke and freestyle. A sportswriters' favorite, she qualified for three spots on the U.S. Olympic team that was headed to Helsinki, Finland, for the 1940 Games.

However, because of the escalating war in Europe, the Olympics were canceled, and Williams went pro, modeling at I. Magnin in downtown Los Angeles. With her stunning good looks and tall, muscular frame, she was a standout.

It didn't take long for showman Billy Rose to notice the photogenic champion. He needed a female lead to star opposite former Olympian and Tarzan screen star Johnny Weissmuller in his San Francisco and Los Angeles Aquacade reviews. Following an audition at L.A.'s Ambassador Hotel, Williams was chosen from a casting call of 100 hopefuls.

MGM executives who saw her in the Aquacade were impressed. After a year of being hounded by the studio and William Morris agent Johnny Hyde, Williams finally agreed to a screen test that paired her with Clark Gable. At the time, she was married to a USC medical student and making $78 a week.

With the diminutive Hyde beside her, Williams made a jaw-dropping entrance to MGM chief Louis B. Mayer’s office but refused his first offer to make her a star.

"Somehow, if you say no to L.B. Mayer and his whole third floor of executives and a top agent as well, they just have to have you. … They had never heard of such a thing," she recalled.

She agreed to the studio's improved offer, signed in October 1941 and made her feature debut alongside Mickey Rooney in Andy Hardy's Double Life (1942), in which she gave the hero a kiss -- underwater.

"The popular Andy Hardy series movies were MGM's tests for its promising stars such as Judy Garland, Lana Turner and Donna Reed," Williams said. "If you didn't make it in those pictures, you were never heard from again."

Williams became a pin-up favorite with G.I.'s and played a USO hostess in A Guy Named Joe (1943).

For Bathing Beauty, she stole the show in the finale when she starred in an elaborate water ballet amid fountains, blazing fires and scores of scantily clad swimmers. She would soon appear on the covers of as many as 15 fan magazines a year, and in 1953, the foreign press voted her the most popular actress in 50 countries.

In the late ’40s, she starred in a series of hugely popular, albeit predictable movies. Most adhered to the boy-meets-girl, girl-swims-away, boy-catches-girl formula, including Thrill of a Romance (1945), Ziegfeld Follies (1945), Easy to Wed (1946), On an Island With You (1948), Neptune’s Daughter, Pagan Love Song (1950) and Duchess of Idaho (1950).

READ THE REST OF THE STORY HERE!


http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/actress-esther-williams-dies-mgm-564112]]> Thu, 6 Jun 2013 14:52:54 clockwatcher http://www.pugetsoundradio.com/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1368222579/ http://www.pugetsoundradio.com/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1368222579/#num1 Legendary singer and actress Lena Horne dies at 92

by TheGrio.com
May 10, 2010

                              

NEW YORK (AP) — Lena Horne, the enchanting jazz singer and actress who reviled the bigotry that allowed her to entertain white audiences but not socialize with them, slowing her rise to Broadway superstardom, has died. She was 92.

Horne died Sunday at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, according to hospital spokeswoman Gloria Chin. Chin would not release any other details.

Horne, whose striking beauty and magnetic sex appeal often overshadowed her sultry voice, was remarkably candid about the underlying reason for her success.

“I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept,” she once said. “I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked.”

In the 1940s, she was one of the first black performers hired to sing with a major white band, the first to play the Copacabana nightclub and among a handful with a Hollywood contract.

In 1943, MGM Studios loaned her to 20th Century-Fox to play the role of Selina Rogers in the all-black movie musical “Stormy Weather.” Her rendition of the title song became a major hit and her signature piece.

On screen, on records and in nightclubs and concert halls, Horne was at home vocally with a wide musical range, from blues and jazz to the sophistication of Rodgers and Hart in songs like “The Lady Is a Tramp” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.”

In her first big Broadway success, as the star of “Jamaica” in 1957, reviewer Richard Watts Jr. called her “one of the incomparable performers of our time.” Songwriter Buddy de Sylva dubbed her “the best female singer of songs.”

But Horne was perpetually frustrated with the public humiliation of racism.

“I was always battling the system to try to get to be with my people. Finally, I wouldn’t work for places that kept us out … it was a damn fight everywhere I was, every place I worked, in New York, in Hollywood, all over the world,” she said in Brian Lanker’s book “I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America.”

While at MGM, she starred in the all-black “Cabin in the Sky,” in 1943, but in most of her other movies, she appeared only in musical numbers that could be cut in the racially insensitive South without affecting the story. These included “I Dood It,” a Red Skelton comedy, “Thousands Cheer” and “Swing Fever,” all in 1943; “Broadway Rhythm” in 1944; and “Ziegfeld Follies” in 1946.

“Metro’s cowardice deprived the musical of one of the great singing actresses,” film historian John Kobal wrote.

Early in her career Horne cultivated an aloof style out of self-preservation, becoming “a woman the audience can’t reach and therefore can’t hurt” she once said.

Later she embraced activism, breaking loose as a voice for civil rights and as an artist. In the last decades of her life, she rode a new wave of popularity as a revered icon of American popular music.

Her 1981 one-woman Broadway show, “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music,” won a special Tony Award. In it, the 64-year-old singer used two renditions — one straight and the other gut-wrenching — of “Stormy Weather” to give audiences a glimpse of the spiritual odyssey of her five-decade career.

A sometimes savage critic, John Simon, wrote that she was “ageless. … tempered like steel, baked like clay, annealed like glass; life has chiseled, burnished, refined her.”

When Halle Berry became the first black woman to win the best actress Oscar in 2002, she sobbed: “This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. … It’s for every nameless, faceless woman of color who now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.”

READ THE REST OF THE STORY HERE!

http://thegrio.com/2010/05/10/legendary-singer-and-actress-lena-horne-dies-at-92/]]> Fri, 10 May 2013 14:49:39 clockwatcher http://www.pugetsoundradio.com/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1367589822/ http://www.pugetsoundradio.com/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1367589822/#num1 Reclusive Winnipeg-born actress Deanna Durbin dies near Paris at 91

          

by ALJEAN HARMETZ
The New York Times News Service
Published Wednesday, May. 01 2013, 10:36 PM EDT

Winnipeg-born Deanna Durbin, who as a plucky child movie star with a sweet soprano voice charmed audiences during the Depression and saved Universal Pictures from bankruptcy before she vanished from public view 64 years ago, has died. She was 91.

In a newsletter, the Deanna Durbin Society said Ms. Durbin died “a few days ago,” quoting her son, Peter H. David, who thanked her admirers for respecting her privacy. No other details were given.

Ms. Durbin had remained determinedly out of public view since 1949, when she retired to a village in France with her third husband.

From 1936 to 1942, Deanna Durbin was everyone’s intrepid kid sister or spunky daughter, a wholesome, radiant, can-do girl who in a series of wildly popular films was always fixing the problems of unhappy adults.

And as an instant Hollywood star with her very first movie, Three Smart Girls, she almost single-handedly fixed the problems of her fretting bosses at Universal, bringing them box-office gold.

In 1946, Ms. Durbin’s salary of $323,477 from Universal made her the second-highest-paid woman in America, just $5,000 behind Bette Davis. At another point, she was reportedly the movies’ best-paid actress.

She was also the favourite actress of Anne Frank, who kept photos of Ms. Durbin on the wall of the family’s Amsterdam hideout, and of Winston Churchill, who insisted on private screenings of her films before they were screened in Britain.

Her own problems began when she outgrew the role that had brought her fame. Critics responded negatively to her attempts to be an adult on screen, as a prostitute in love with a killer in Robert Siodmak’s bleak film noir Christmas Holiday (1944) and as a debutante mixed up in a murder plot in Lady on a Train (1945.)

The child-star persona affected her personal life as well.

“When my first marriage failed, everyone said that I could never divorce. It would ruin the ‘image,’” she told Films and Filming magazine in 1983. “How could anybody really think that I was going to spend the rest of my life with a man I found I didn’t love, just for the sake of an ‘image’?”

The man was Vaughn Paul, an assistant director, whom Ms. Durbin had married at 19 in 1941. The marriage lasted two years. Her second marriage, to Felix Jackson, the 43-year-old producer of several of her films, also ended in divorce, after the birth of a daughter.

Her third marriage was a success: In 1950, at 28, she married Charles David, the 44-year-old French director of Lady on a Train. After starring in 21 feature films, she retired to a French farmhouse.

“I hated being in a goldfish bowl,” she said.

In an e-mail, film critic David Thomson told The Globe and Mail: “The remarkable thing about Deanna Durbin now is to see how thoroughly she walked away from it all as if she guessed that after the war her kind of movie was not coming back. She said she didn’t like making movies, and I believe her. The other thing is the huge gap between her stardom in the early ’40s and the way no young person now knows who she was, or why.”

REASD THE REST OF THE STORY HERE!


http://www.theglobeandmail.com.....-91/article11673907/]]> Fri, 3 May 2013 07:03:42 clockwatcher http://www.pugetsoundradio.com/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1341790731/ http://www.pugetsoundradio.com/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1341790731/#num1 Oscar-Winner Ernest Borgnine Dies at 95

2:20 PM PDT 7/8/2012
by Mike Barnes , Duane Byrge
HollywoodReporter.com

  
The actor, who won his Oscar for his starring role in 1955's "Marty," also delighted audiences with his turn in the 1960s sitcom "McHale's Navy." He was 95.


Ernest Borgnine, the dependable Academy Award-winning actor who made a career out of playing working stiffs and the heavy through a sturdy six decades of work in films, television and Broadway, has died. He was 95.

Borgnine, who won the best actor Oscar for his sensitive portrayal of the simple, love-starved butcher in the 1955 best-picture winner Marty, died Sunday of renal failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, his longtime manager confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter. He was surrounded by family.

"It's a very sad day," Borgnine's manager Lynda Bensky tells THR. "The industry has lost someone great, the caliber of which we will never see again. A true icon, but more importantly the world has lost a sage and loving man who taught us all how to 'grow young.' His infectious smile and chuckle made the world a happier place."

The Italian-American actor from Connecticut also is widely known for playing the carefree and conniving Quinton McHale in the hit ABC series McHale’s Navy that aired from 1962-66.

Borgnine also made indelible impressions for his performances as Fatso, a brutal stockade sergeant who beats Frank Sinatra to death in From Here to Eternity (1953); as Dutch, a member of The Wild Bunch in the 1969 Western classic from director Sam Peckinpah; as a passenger fighting for his life in the disaster classic The Poseidon Adventure (1972); and as the voice of Mermaid Man on SpongeBob SquarePants.

Borgnine became the oldest performer to be nominated for a Golden Globe when he was acknowledged for the 2007 television movie A Grandpa for Christmas. And in 2009, at age 92, he was nominated for an Emmy for his guest performance in the final season of ER.

In all, Borgnine was credited with more than 40 movie roles and more than 200 TV appearances, stretching from such early anthology series as Philco Playhouse and G.E. Theatre to a role as Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi in the 1973 telefilm Legend in Granite to his stint as a good-natured, pasta-loving doorman on the NBC 1995-97 sitcom The Single Guy. He also starred opposite Jan-Michael Vincent in 1984-86's Airwolf, a CBS series created by Don Bellisario of NCIS fame.

Borgnine was honored with a lifetime achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild in 2010.

Ernest Borgnine was born Ermes Effron Borgnine on Jan. 24, 1917, in Hamden, Conn., to Italian-immigrant parents. When he was 2, his mother took him to live in Milan, but they returned to the U.S., and he attended elementary and high school in New Haven, Conn.

Following his high school graduation, Borgnine enlisted in the Navy and served as an apprentice seaman. He served for 10 years, rising to the rank of chief petty officer/gunner’s mate. Following his service, he used the G.I. Bill to enroll in the Randall School of Dramatic Art in Hartford.

His first professional acting experience came at the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Va., where he painted scenery, drove a truck and appeared in a variety of roles. He made his way to New York, where he won his first role on Broadway in the 1940s in Harvey, playing an hospital attendant. He soon made another Broadway appearance as a gangster in Mrs. McThing, which starred Helen Hayes.

Borgnine was spotted by a Hollywood talent scout from Columbia Pictures, and he was soon cast in his first film, The Whistle at Eaton Falls (1951).

Marty began as a teleplay by Paddy Chayefsky that aired in May 1953 on The Goodyear Television Playhouse with Rod Steiger in the title role as the butcher living with his mother and Nancy Marchand playing Clara, another lonely soul who Marty meets at a dance.

The teleplay was adapted into a full-length feature film at United Artists in 1955, with Borgnine as the butcher and Betsy Blair as Clara. In addition to the Oscars for best film and Borgnine, the film earned Academy Awards for director Delbert Mann and Chayefsky and earned the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

READ MORE HERE!


http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/oscar-winner-ernest-borgnine-dies-346376]]> Sun, 8 Jul 2012 16:38:51 clockwatcher http://www.pugetsoundradio.com/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1338997025/ http://www.pugetsoundradio.com/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1338997025/#num1 Fears mounting
over B.C. film production


Photo: Jeff Vinnick - Globe and Mail

By Marsha Lederman

Tuesday, Jun. 05 2012

Once upon a time, the land of Hollywood North was in despair, fighting the evils – a high dollar! tax issues! – of the local production industry.

At Vancouver Film Studios, last January was especially dire: Only three of their 10 stages were occupied, largely owing to the cancellation of the Syfy series Eureka last year.

Then Prince Charming appeared in the form of pilot season. Nine pilots rode into town, eight of which went to camera – including Beauty and the Beast, which requested VFS’s last two available stages, and even took over the administration’s desks to accommodate production.

But, alas, a fairy-tale ending was not to be.

Beauty and the Beast did not get picked up (a different show with the same name did, however). And now that both the Canadian and American networks have revealed their fall lineups, B.C.’s production industry is assessing some less than inspiring results: Of the pilots shot in Vancouver, the U.S. networks have picked up only four: Arrow; Emily Owens, MD; Cult and Red Widow. Meanwhile, Alcatraz, The Secret Circle and the Canadian sci-fi series Sanctuary were cancelled. Fringe was put on notice that it would just one more season on Fox.

Coupled with a disappointing number of features, none of this is what the industry needs to calm fears over its future. And with a high Canadian dollar, the imminent disappearance of the film-friendly HST, and – the real evil stepmother in this story – a lack of parity on tax credits, the B.C. production industry is now looking to protect its billion-dollar industry. One step is lobbying the province on tax credits. Another: aiming at a national film strategy.

Certainly, any talk about the film and TV industry in B.C. is bound to lead to tax credits: the provincial tax credit on foreign film production is 33 per cent on B.C. labour, compared with the far more attractive offers in Ontario and Quebec: 25 per cent of the overall spend. As a result, work has gone east.

“I think it’s quite good,” B.C. Film Commissioner Susan Croome says. “We lost three, but we gained four. We’re net up one ... so we’re holding our own.”

It’s not quite good enough to calm fears about B.C.’s production industry. The level of feature work is a concern, even with the big budget Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters shooting in town.

“They’re shooting a feature called Pacific Rim in Ontario,” says Peter Mitchell, president and chief executive officer of Vancouver Film Studios, referring to the Guillermo del Toro film shot in Toronto earlier this year. “I mean, come on.”

B.C. production types like to play down the competition with Ontario, but there were quiet gasps when industry figures came out earlier this year. While 2011 saw a 16-per-cent increase for B.C., it slipped to the No. 4 ranked production centre in North America, with $1.19-billion in production compared with Ontario’s $1.26-billion.

With its significant market share and locations across the country, lighting equipment giant William F. White can be seen as a barometer for Canada’s production industry. And Chairman and CEO Paul Bronfman believes that the situation in Vancouver last year was even worse than the film commission’s figures suggest.

“I don’t know where they get their numbers,” he says. “Our market share runs about 60 per cent in Vancouver – and Vancouver was way down.” By about 29 per cent, he says.

“If we are on an equal playing field with Ontario in terms of tax credits, we’ll kill them,” Mitchell says. “I don’t think we need to do that. We just need to get closer.”

Peter Leitch, president at North Shore and Mammoth Studios, is working on it. As chair of the Motion Picture Production Industry Association of British Columbia, he is is in talks with the province about the tax-credit situation. And at the federal level, he is trying to raise interest in creating a national strategy on film and television production. A more level playing field would benefit B.C., but also ensure that provinces don’t compete against each other so much as they compete against jurisdictions in other countries.

Vancouver lost the big feature The Wolverine to Sydney, after the Australian government offered a $12.8-million (Australian) tax incentive to the X-Men sequel. And some U.S. states are offering generous (some argue unsustainable) tax credits, including Louisiana. New Orleans is calling itself Hollywood South these days, and has lured a couple of features that some feel belonged in B.C.: Vancouver native Seth Rogen’s The End of the World, currently shooting in New Orleans, and 21 Jump Street, based on the Vancouver-shot TV series.

Moreso than Ontario, B.C. is heavily invested in the so-called service industry – with foreign productions accounting for about 80 per cent of the business traditionally, and domestic productions only 20 per cent. Leitch says that has probably fallen to 15 per cent.

Canadian announcements did confirm new B.C.-shot series Motive and Package Deal, which join locally shot Canadian productions such as Arctic Air, Continuum, Mr. Young and Primeval-New World, as well as high-profile reality series such as Real Housewives of Vancouver and The Bachelor Canada.

The industry wants to see more of the higher-budgeted scripted series. The B.C. Producers’ Branch of the Canadian Media Production Association is part of a coalition calling for the creation of a B.C. Media Development Corporation, similar to Ontario’s, to help boost Canadian productions.

The digital-animation and visual-effects sector meanwhile, has seen substantial growth. Major players such as Pixar, Sony Pictures Imageworks and George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic have set up shop in Vancouver. And local companies are growing to accommodate the demand.

“This is now a destination for Hollywood,” says Jason Dowdeswell with Image Engine, a Vancouver company that established itself with its Oscar-nominated work on Neill Blomkamp’s District 9. “We have what I call the three Ts: the tax credit, the talent and the time zone.”

The 17.5-per-cent Digital Animation and Visual Effects (DAVE) tax credit has helped to boost the industry to the point where there are almost 20 major visual-effects houses operating in Vancouver.

While both Leitch and Mitchell warn that their studios are owned by real-estate developers, who could decide that townhouses would be more economically viable than television, the players seems to be betting on a future for this industry, with continued investment in infrastrcuture.

VFS is building two more stages. Across the bridge, North Vancouver’s Capilano University recently opened the Nat and Flora Bosa Centre for Film and Animation, funded in large part by the Bosas, who own North Shore and Mammoth. The $40-million, 6,662-square-metre state-of-the-art facility serves as a gleaming commitment to the future of film in this part of the world: a sort of castle, counting on a happily ever after.

Currently filming in B.C.

Features

Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters

Thor Freudenthal directs this Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief sequel – based on the bestselling books by Rick Riordan.

Seventh Son

This fantasy/action/adventure film stars Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore and Ben Barnes.

Candy Land

This feature adaptation of the children’s game will reportedly star Adam Sandler, who filmed Happy Gilmore here in the nineties.

TV Series

The Bachelor Canada

The first Canadian version of the competitive romantic “reality” franchise is shooting on the west coast of B.C.

Level Up

This Cartoon Network series follows four unlikely friends who accidentally open a portal from the virtual world to the real world.

Primeval - New World

The team behind this Canadian science fiction series includes Sanctuary alumni Martin Wood and Gillian Horvath.

Psych

Now in its seventh season, Psych is currently the USA Network’s longest-running series. It shot its 100th episode last week.

The Liquidator

“Liquidation King” Jeff Schwartz wheels and deals his way through everything from heavy machinery to 96,000 packages of noodles. OLN will announce a launch date soon for this new series.

The Haunting Hour

Now shooting Season three, this horror-fantasy series is based on the books by R.L. Stine.

Movie of the Week

Holiday Spin

This Lifetime network Christmas movie stars Karate Kid Ralph Macchio.

Digital Features

(once known as straight-to-video)

True Justice: The Shot

Stars nineties action hero Steven Seaga

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/fears-mounting-over-bc-film-production/article4233468/


.


.]]> Wed, 6 Jun 2012 08:37:05 SkyLine