As clickbait-ish material goes, this is not bad at all. I had no idea Annie Oakley was so cute!
Category: Entertainment
R.I.P. Teri Garr
Her passing is not unexpected. She has been batting multiple sclerosis for decades, and she was 79 years old (maybe). The lack of surprise, however, doesn’t really lighten the burden of the news. She was truly likable, as a performer and as herself.
Every source agrees that she was born on December 11th, but nobody seems to know for sure how old she was. Apparently at some time in her career she went full Mimi Rogers on her birth year. Her year of birth is listed in various sources as 1944 (Wikipedia/IMDb), 1945 (Historical Gazetteer of the United States), 1947 (California voter registration) and 1949 (Screen World). IMDb recently changed her birth year from 1947 to 1944. So maybe she was 79, maybe as young as 74, maybe somewhere in between.
Her only real nudity came when she doffed her duds for Francis Ford Coppola in One from the Heart (1982). She was in her late 30s.
Much earlier in her career, she may have been naked in a 1970 film called The Moonshine War but as you can see from the capture below, that could have been anyone.
Here’s the F. Murray Abraham anecdote from John Mulaney
A Salieri Day present from Roger:
I love me some F man!
R.I.P. Kristoffer Kristofferson, 88
I didn’t realize he was that old.
Singer, songwriter, musician, actor, elite college athlete, Rhodes Scholar, top amateur boxer, essayist, Army helicopter pilot …
He lived enough life for about five people
R.I.P., two-time Oscar winner Dame Maggie Smith
Six Oscar nominations, two wins
Maggie Smith had extraordinary fortune with second-hand roles.
She won an Oscar for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Vanessa Redgrave had played Brodie in the stage production, and was originally cast in the role. However, she was unavailable when the film production began.
Maggie would be nominated for another Oscar in 1972, for playing another eccentric role in Travels With My Aunt, and that time the industry scuttlebutt was that she inherited the role from Kate Hepburn!
Nudity wasn’t her thing. She turned 18 in 1952, which meant that she had no opportunities to get naked while still in her twenties. By the time nudity was commonplace in cinema, Maggie had already established her specialty – quirky, prim spinsters, the type of women who were old even when they were young. That era was followed by many years of playing women who really were old, ranging from slightly dotty ones to those with the panache of a grand dame.
She has been old so long that we don’t ever picture her as she appeared in 1958’s “Nowhere to Go.”
Here are her career nudity … er … highlights.
California Suite – 1978
My House in Umbria – 2003
Sidebar discussion below: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and that dumb, ear-worm song that accompanied it.
This is now my favorite song
I uploaded this to the hard disk in my car:
R.I.P. James Earl Jones
Here’s why he was famous:
- The voice of Darth Vader and Mufasa
- The ultimate baseball fan in Field of Dreams
- “This is CNN”
Here’s why he was great:
I have seen many of the greatest modern stage actors live on the boards, like Derek Jacobi, Richard Kiley and Richard Harris, and I’ve seen recorded performances of the legends like Olivier, Mark Rylance, Nicol Williamson and Richard Burton. I’ve always loved the theater, and did some bad stage acting of my own when I was young and even more foolish than I am now.
And I’ll say this:
Some of the gentlemen I mentioned may have been greater stage actors than James. People wiser than I say so. But of all the performers I’ve ever seen, no man or woman has ever commanded a stage the way James Earl Jones did in The Great White Hope, which I saw when I was in college. When he was a young man, his legs were lightning, and his voice was thunder. His voice didn’t just go through you, it was all around you. It was everywhere. When he spoke, that voice became your universe. If the lord god is real and has a voice, he won’t be needing it any more. He now has James Earl Jones to speak for him.
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Something fascinating: James Earl Jones’s father, Robert Earl Jones, in One Potato, Two Potato (1964):
James Earl Jones worked with Robert Earl Jones on stage in a 1962 production of a play named “Moon on a Rainbow Shawl.”
Rita Jenrette in Zombie Island Massacre (1984)
Nobody can say that Rita Jenrette hasn’t had an interesting life. She was, at various times, a Republican Party power figure (although married to a Democratic congressman), a scholar, a big-time real estate wheeler-dealer, a central figure of the ABSCAM scandal, a TV presenter, a Clairol spokesman, a Playboy model, a novelist, an autobiographer, a princess, an actress … and probably many other things I’m forgetting.
She was probably also a power forward in the WNBA and the inventor of insulated gloves, for all I know, even though I just made that shit up.
I’ll let Wikipedia pick up a famous Rita anecdote:
She gave an interview to Playboy that appeared in the April 1981 issue, accompanied by a nude pictorial. The article’s revelation that she and her husband had sex on the steps of the U.S. Capitol during a break in an all-night House session caused a hoopla. The comedy group Capitol Steps takes its name from this escapade.
Years after her party girl days, she is still in the news. The Italian government just chased her out of the home where she has lived for decades, thanks to an inheritance battle between her and the children of her late husband. When she refused a court order to leave, the Carabinieri showed up to to evict her, causing a classic scene right out of an Italian movie, where she evaded arrest by fleeing through the back door of the villa, but tripped in the process, breaking two ribs and her clavicle.
This is no ordinary house they are fighting over. It is said to be the most expensive in the world. It is surrounded by the usual expansive gardens dotted with the obligatory statues of deities. The house itself is six stories tall and covers half of an acre. One of its ceilings is valued at $350 million! You’re wondering how that could be. The ceiling mural was painted by Carafuckingvaggio himself, and is thought to be the only such work of art in existence.
Meh. No big deal. It looks exactly like the ceiling of my trailer, which was coincidentally also painted by Caravaggio – Chuck “Dirty Needles” Caravaggio, a tattoo artist who lives in the next trailer. He painted my ceiling in lieu of repaying the thirty bucks I lent him.
I’m just fuckin’ witcha. I don’t really live in a trailer.
But I am hoping to upgrade to one.
Anyway …
Two years after being in the very lap of luxury, Her Incredibly Serene and Formerly Rich Highness, Princess Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi, is now more like Her Lowness, broke and homeless, essentially couch-surfing. Did she deserve such a fate? I look at it this way. The odds of the Italian legal system producing a fair and correct decision are about the same as the likelihood of Kristi Noem and Michael Vick being named the co-chairs of PETA, so yeah, she probably got hosed. It’s all about the Euros, signore.
Rita did the whole Playboy-and-B-movie thing in the early 80s, and that included Zombie Island Massacre (3.3 at IMDb). Now this is a very sensible film! For example, the first three full minutes of the film consist entirely of Rita naked. That’s followed by a mere six minutes of exposition before it’s back to the fun stuff, with Rita doing a sex scene in perfect light. It’s good to see a director who has his priorities straight, and so soon in his career – Massacre was the very first film he ever directed. It was also the very last, although he lived almost 40 more years.
Hey, by the way, why does anyone go to Zombie Island in the first place? “Hey, Marge, whaddya think? Disney and Europe are so bourgeois. The brochure for this Zombie Island looks nice, and they think the volcano may be dormant now. Plus it’s all-inclusive!”
I hear it’s even all-inclusive for the zombies – all the brains you can eat!
For the non-zombie population, this seems like even a worse vacation choice than Bergman Island …
or worse than this place …
or (and I know this is hard to believe) possibly even worse than Delaware.
But you know, it’s an island, and life’s a beach, so I guess people can put up with a few wandering undead people when it means quality sun-and-snorkel time at an affordable price, especially when unlimited booze is part of the package.
I can see why Rita wasn’t worried. She was a Republican, so she was relatively safe from creatures seeking brains.
“15 Masterpiece Cartoons That Never Got the Recognition They Deserved”
I recognize only about a third of this collection, so I suppose they are right about the “unrecognized” half of the equation, but I can’t offer much about the “deserved” half.
(I did think The Tick cartoon series was pretty funny when I watched it with my two youngest. Damn, that was a long time ago.)
A bit of movie trivia – new to me
I found this story intriguing, so I followed up a bit. It seems other sources dispute the Cracked version. Den of Geek had a long article on this subject, in which they claim:
- The footage was not “lost,” but had been shipped to the salt mine for storage.
- The scenes were deemed “unworthy” simply because the film stock had deteriorated. (The Cracked verbiage does not state outright, but implies that the scenes were never included in a special edition because of their “unworthy” content.)
The unused footage was packaged off to a Transylvanian salt mine for storage, so when he came looking for the footage it was in such poor shape it was no longer usable. Anderson himself has recently reaffirmed this, seemingly dashing any hope of the lost footage re-emerging from a black hole, like the titular ship itself.
There is a third version of the story told by director Anderson in a 2022 interview:
The problem with the deleted material is that we were right before the DVD revolution when Event Horizon was released. We were going out on VHS in ancillaries. And on VHS there was no room for all of these deleted scenes, there was no reason for the studio to keep it. Now if we’d made the movie a couple of years later, they’d have been all over the deleted scenes. But by the time DVD had happened, and the audience for the movie started demanding special editions, they hadn’t archived a lot of that stuff. So it’s just not there. I think to really reinstitute what the old cut was, you’d need to probably do what they did with the Snyder Cut where you have to go and shoot some material again.
He makes no mention of the salt mine. He simply says the footage “is just not there.”
The deeper I dug into the source of the “salt mine” story, the more dead-ends I found. The salt mine tale is a claim that many have repeated, but I could not determine how the tale originated, nor could I find any first person account. I followed links that claimed Anderson’s confirmation of the story, then found no such confirmation. My current suspicion is that the entire story is bullshit, but I’m open to abandon that suspicion based on further evidence.
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FOOTNOTE 1: what exactly is in that footage?
Den of Geek’s article also explains in general terms what was in the footage.
One fan went into great detail comparing the theatrical version to the existing deleted scenes to the lost deleted scenes.
If you want to totally geek out on this topic, here is the script.
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FOOTNOTE 2: Additional nudity in the deleted material?
Not much.
Holly Chant was topless in the official release:
Emily Booth is topless for very few frames in the known deleted footage:
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FOOTNOTE 3: Is it a good film?
I called it a brilliant genre flick, albeit one not without flaws, but I added that it had close to zero crossover appeal. From what I have read, my guess is that Anderson’s original cut would have been even more popular with genre fans, but would have had even less crossover appeal.
Roger Ebert awarded only two stars, summed up by a witty comment: “The screenplay creates a sense of foreboding and afterboding, but no actual boding.”
We both compared it to Solaris. (We referred to the Tarkovsky version. Event Horizon came out before Soderbergh’s remake of Solaris.) I summed it up as “Solaris with action scenes,” which I meant as a compliment.