The Silver Screen Oasis

Cute!

My Dad's favorite song was "More," and I always had to be ready for a command performance. The folks also loved "Fascination," "Shangrila," "As Time Goes By," and a Rachmaninoff concerto I could never master, but learned to fake.

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS was the favorite movie of a friend of mine in college. He knew little about film, rarely saw one. But he liked this one! It is clever. I've only seen it once, a long time ago. It's worth another look.

Judith Crist was my first too, thanks to TV Guide. I probably disagreed with her as often as shared the same view. But she wrote well, and she wrote succinctly. I have a short attention span. I like a writer who gets to the point. Marvin Hamlisch wrote the sweetest little song for the closing credits of TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN. It's so effective on the heels of a ridiculous, insane movie; it comes out of nowhere. I almost think it shows signs of the more sensitive and tender filmmaker Woody Allen was later to become.

I love that little song at the end of Take the Money and Run, Red! As soon as you mentioned it I remembered it, it's sweet and funny and a little deeper than it should be. It's not at all like a Laugh-In joke sting, if you know what I mean...."This was a funny movie, now laugh". There's something kind of poignant, light and at the same time kitschy Hollywood about it. He captures Allen's irony.

Poignant moments in wacky comedy are very effective. That's probably my favorite concept in all of dramatic storytelling. It sets up a beautiful contrast. Chaplin did it better than anybody.

The director of the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Mel Stuart, has died of cancer.

From the Hollywood Reporter:

Mel Stuart, an award-winning documentarian who also directed Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, has died. He was 83.

His daughter, Madeline Stuart, said he died Thursday night of cancer at his home in Los Angeles.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Stuart was associated with David L. Wolper, with whom he established a base of West Coast documentary production at a time when New York filmmakers and TV networks' news divisions dominated the field.

Stuart's documentaries during those years include The Making of the President 1960, for which he won an Emmy, as well as subsequent explorations of the campaigns in 1964 and 1968. Other programs were The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and the Oscar-nominated Four Days in November.

His groundbreaking 1973 film Wattstax focused on the Wattstax music festival of the previous year and Los Angeles' Watts community in the aftermath of the 1965 riots.

By 1980, Stuart was an independent producer and director whose credits include portraits for PBS' "American Masters" on artist Man Ray and the director Billy Wilder. He was executive producer of the 1980s ABC series "Ripley's Believe It or Not," whose host was Jack Palance.

Airing on PBS in 2005, The Hobart Shakespeareans was Stuart's profile of a teacher in inner-city Los Angeles whose fifth-grade class each year performed a play by William Shakespeare.

He produced or directed various dramas including The Triangle Factory Fire Scandal, Ruby and Oswald and the 1981 TV film Bill, starring Mickey Rooney and Dennis Quaid, which won a Golden Globe and a Peabody award.

The 1971 musical fantasy "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory," starring Gene Wilder, was Stuart's response to a young reader of the Roald Dahl children's classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That fan was Stuart's daughter Madeline, who asked her dad to make a movie of the book she loved. With Wilder as Willy Wonka (and 11-year-old Madeline in a cameo role as a student in a classroom scene), it became an enduring family favorite.

Other features include Stuart's 1969 comedy-romance, If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, starring Suzanne Pleshette and Ian McShane.

A New York native, Stuart attended New York University, where he set aside his early aspirations to be a composer in favor of a career in filmmaking.
Before joining forces with the Wolper Organization, he was a researcher for CBS News' 1950s documentary series, "The 20th Century," which was hosted and narrated by Walter Cronkite.
Besides his daughter, an interior designer, Stuart is survived by sons Andrew, a literary agent, and Peter, a filmmaker.

Wow, I think I've seen almost all of the works mentioned, those documentaries, regular movies and TV movies. How sad that I never knew who he was, but enjoyed most of his productions.

By the time this summer is over, I'm worried I'm going to be thought of as the town crier around here because though I keep imploring Death to take a holiday, he seems to be refusing. I'm starting to think maybe we should try to get him up a tree and keep him there for awhile. Anyone with me?

Because the bad news just keeps rolling in:

Carlos Rambaldi, the special effects wizard behind E.T., Ridley Scott's Alien and Dino deLaurentiis' King 'everybody lovea my Kong', Kong has died:

From the Hollywood Reporter:

Carlo Rambaldi, the Italian special effects wizard behind Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Ridley Scott’s Alien, and the 1976 version of King Kong from John Guillermin, died Friday at the age of 86, the Italian media reported.

Rambaldi, a three-time Oscar winner, had been living in the southern Italian city of Lemezia Terme, where he died Friday after a long illness. Further details were not immediately available.

Rambaldi was born in the northern village of Vigarano Mainarda in Emilia-Romagna in 1925, where he was graduated from Bologna’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1951 with intentions of becoming a painter. But six years later, he created a dragon for the low-budget fantasy film Sigfredo, directed by early Italian film pioneer Giacomo Gentilomo. Enamored with the medium, Rimbaldi moved to Rome and stayed in the world of cinema.

Rambaldi worked in Italy during the Golden Era of Italian films that lasted through the 1970s. In 1971, he had the unlikely distinction of becoming the first special effects specialist required to prove that his work was not “real,” when Italian magistrates prosecuted Lucio Fulci, the director of a film called Una lucertola con la pelle di donna (A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin) for animal cruelty in connection with dog mutilation scenes. Rambaldi famously illustrated his special effects techniques to a judge, appearing in headlines and sparing Fulci a two-year prison term.

He caught the attention of famed Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis, who brought him to the U.S. to work on King Kong. Within a few years, he made a name for himself in Hollywood, where he also played key roles in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977, Richard Fleischer’s Conan the Destroyer and David Lynch’s Dune, both in 1984.

Rambaldi won a special achievement Oscar in 1977 for King Kong, before the Oscar for special effects existed. Once the category was created, he won it twice: in 1980 for Alien and three years later for E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, the film he remained best known for.

“Carlo Rambaldi was E.T.’s Geppetto,” Corriera della Sera quoted Spielberg as saying, a reference to Pinocchio’s mythological creator.

Rambaldi’s role in films, in which he created robots and makeup on actors, started to diminish with the rise of computer graphics, and he never hid his disdain for computerized effects in film.

“Digital effects cost around eight times as much as mechatronics,” the newspaper La Repubblica quoted Rambaldi as saying. “Effects on E.T. cost $1 million and took three months. If we wanted to do the same thing with computers, it would take more than two hundred people and five months.”

Jeffrey Okun, the chair of the Visual Effects Society, remembered Rambaldi in a statement sent to THR Friday.

"While I never met Mr. Rambaldi, I know I speak for the entire Society when I say that the lifelike breakthrough puppeted alien he created for ET significantly raised the bar for all creatures, including what would become CG created creatures. His ability to inject emotion into plastic and metal still stands as a monument to what is possible... His talent was immense and he will be missed, but his legacy and challenge will live on," Okun said.

For those of us of us of certain age, Al Freeman, Jr. was one of the touchstones of the late 1960s/1970s television and one of the best actors of that era.

He has died at 78. While the majority of obits are concentrating on his role in Malcom X as well as his role on One Life to Live, many of us remember him for his role in Finian's Rainbow, My Sweet Charlie, Hot L Baltimore, the miniseries King and Homicide, Life on the Streets.

From the Star Tribune:

Emmy-winning actor, director and screenwriter Al Freeman, Jr., who played Capt. Ed Hall on One Life to Live for more than a decade, and Elijah Muhammad in Spike Lee’s 1992 film Malcolm X, has died.

Freeman, 78, lived on a boat outside of Washington, D.C. and taught at Howard University.

“It is with tremendous sadness that the passing of our beloved Professor Al Freeman, Jr. is confirmed,” Kim James Bey, chair of Howard University’s theater department, told the Star Tribune Friday afternoon.

Freeman was best known for his screen roles. He appeared on such programs as "Roots," “The Cosby Show,” “Law and Order” and “Homicide: Life on the Streets.” He won Emmys for “One Life to Live” and “Malcolm X." He also won an NAACP Image Award for his Elijah Muhammad.

Freeman first gained acclaim for his stage work in Amiri Baraka’s “Dutchman,” in a 1967 off-Broadway production. He played a black subway rider who is tormented by a white woman. He reprised his performance on screen in a movie adaptation.

On Broadway, he acted alongside legendary choreographer Alvin Ailey and acting icon Cicely Tyson in Peter S. Feibleman’s “Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright” in 1962. Two years later, he starred in James Baldwin’s “Blues for Mister Charlie,” under the direction of Burgess Meredith.

Born in San Antonio, Tex., Freeman served in the Air Force during the Korean War. Afterwards, he embarked on an acting career that was inspiring to many in the field.

"At a time when we rarely saw black actors on TV, he was on a soap," said Ralph Remington, director of theater and musical theater at the National Endowment for the Arts and founder of Pillsbury House Theatre in Minneapolis. "He was well-known and all over the TV. "He was legendary for his contributions."

Oh dang it. Loved Al Freeman Jr. .... A classy gentleman, and a great actor.

R.I.P.

A sweet man. R.I.P.

Awww geez! Sad news!

As it happens, I saw Mr. Freeman last night. He played a young cop in the Sinatra vehicle, THE DETECTIVE.

Also in Sidney Pollack's (Strange) 1969’s Castle Keep. w/ Burt Lancaster

It's great to see you posting again, Vallo! Thanks for stopping by.

Actor Ron Palillo, best known for his role as Arnold Horshack on Welcome Back, Kotter has died.

From the Hollywood Reporter;

Ron Palillo, who played oddball student Arnold Horshack in the 1970s sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, died at his home near Palm Beach, Fla., on Tuesday morning, the Palm Beach Post reports.

The newspaper cites confirmation from a friend of the actor, who was 63.

Palillo was best known for his role as catchphrase-generating high school class clown Horshack -- one of the Sweathogs -- in Welcome Back, Kotter, which ran on ABC from 1975-79 and also starred John Travolta and Gabe Kaplan.

His other TV credits include guest appearances on The Love Boat, Cagney & Lacey and The A-Team, as well as voice roles on '90s-era animated series such as Darkwing Duck. In 2002, he took on Saved the Bell actor Dustin Diamond in a match for the show Celebrity Boxing 2 that resulted in Diamond's victory.

Palillo, who was born in Chelshire, Conn., studied Shakespeare at the University of Connecticut and later taught acting classes at the G-Star Academy in Palm Springs, Fla.

Cause of death is not yet determined, according to the Palm Beach Post, which notes that Palillo had not been sick or in the hospital.

Palillo is survived by Joseph Gramm, his partner of 41 years.