Or you could just listen to James Brown.
March 28, 1940 -
United Artists released the Alfred Hitchcock adaptation of Daphne Du Maruier's atmospheric thriller, Rebecca, starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine and Judith Anderson on this date.
Because Laurence Olivier wanted his then-girlfriend Vivien Leigh to play the lead role, he treated Joan Fontaine horribly. This shook Fontaine up quite a bit, so Alfred Hitchcock decided to capitalize on this by telling her EVERYONE on the set hated her, thus making her shy and uneasy - just what he wanted from her performance.
March 28, 1941 -
Universal Pictures released 'the B movie', Man Made Monster starring Lionel Atwell and Lon Chaney, Jr. on this date.
Based on the story, The Electric Man which Universal had purchased for $3,300 in 1935 as a potential Boris Karloff / Bela Lugosi vehicle to be titled The Man in the Cab. The film launched Lon Chaney Jr.'s career as a star in horror films and the film's success directly led to his casting in the big budget role of his career, The Wolf Man.
March 28, 1942 -
Another fine Looney Tunes cartoon, The Wabbit Who Came to Supper, was released on this date.
As Bugs steps out of the bathtub and readjusts his towel (at appx 3:06 in), the white tub in the gap between his legs creates the illusion that he is exposing himself. Try not to go back and look.
March 28, 1963 -
Alfred Hitchcock's follow-up to Psycho, The Birds, starring Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedron premiered in New York on this date.
Tippi Hedren's daughter Melanie Griffith was given a present by Alfred Hitchcock during the filming: a doll that looked exactly like Hedren, eerily so. The creepiness was compounded by the ornate wooden box it came in, which the young girl took to be a coffin.
March 28, 1967 -
NBC broke new ground in television programming by using a world-premiere, feature length movie as the preview of a potential new television series called Ironside, on this date.
I've often wondered what the line item budget was for nipple rouge on this film?
Today in History:
March 28, 0 -
According to Des Pascha Comutus, a treatise written in 243 CE (because you know, I sit around and read old Latin treatises all the time,) Jesus Christ's birthday was March 28. It later became the familiar December 25 after the Catholic Church changed it in 336 AD.
So Merry Christmas everybody.
March 28, 37 -
Caligula took a break from the close relationship he had with his sisters and the unnatural congress he engaged in with his horse, to accepts the titles of the Principate awarded by the Senate and entered Rome triumphantly as Emperor.
Unlike his predecessors, Caligula was the first of the men who would serve as full-fledged emperors, with unlimited power. And luckily for the Roman empire, he was cruel, probably insane and a sexual deviant.
The weekends must have been a blast at the Palace.
March 28, 193 -
The Roman ruler Pertinax was at his palace when a contingent of some three hundred soldiers rushed the gates. Pertinax was somewhat distracted. Ancient sources suggest that the soldiers had received only half their promised donativum (pay or bribe money not to kill him). Pertinax had only been emperor for 86 days and didn't have enough time to sell off the previous Emperor Commodus' property (including the concubines and youths Commodus kept for his sexual pleasures) in the giant fire sale he was having.
Neither the guards on duty nor the palace officials chose to resist them. Pertinax, although advised to flee, attempted to reason with them (never try to reason with unpaid Roman soldiers on a rampage), and was almost successful before being struck down by a member of the Praetorian Guard. There being no obvious successor and no Senatorial volunteers, the Guard auctions off the emperorship. The high bidder was Senator Didius Julianus, for 300 million sesterces. After hearing of this, Roman general Septimus Severus in Dalmatia marched on Rome, beheading the new emperor upon arrival.
Both of the films, The Fall of the Roman Empire and Gladiator take the same historical event as a starting point.
March 28, 1515 -
...God save us from gloomy saints!.
March 28, 1921 -
Dirk Bogarde (Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde), actor and the epitome of coolness, was born on this date.
He was the only cast member of A Bridge Too Far to have actually served at the actual battles depicted in the film.
March 28, 1930 -
Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks.
(I can't help myself - I just love this song) Constantinople and Angora change their names to Istanbul and Ankara on this date.
March 28, 1941-
Virginia Woolf drowned herself by weighing her pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse near her home because she had a dream that Nicole Kidman would portray her in a film with a truly horrifying fake nose on this date.
Lesser writers would have done the same.
March 28, 1964 -
First pirate radio station began to broadcast off the coast of England on this date. Radio Caroline debuted with a combination of rock music and lively disk jockey who's patter played to a huge audience in Great Britain.
British authorities, tried unsuccessfully, to shut down the radio station ship. Radio Caroline had become competition to the staid and usually dull British Broadcasting Corporation.
March 28, 1979 -
The Unit 2 nuclear power plant (a pressurized water reactor manufactured by Babcock & Wilcox) on the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania near Harrisburg suffered a partial core meltdown.
The Three Mile Island accident was the worst accident in American commercial nuclear power generating history, even though it led to no deaths or injuries to plant workers or members of the nearby community.
And so it goes.
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