For those of you not near your church calendar, today is the feast of St. Michael the Archangel. It's also known in England as Michaelmas Day. St. Michael is the patron saint of the sea and maritime lands, of ships and boatmen, of horses and horsemen. He was the Angel who hurled Lucifer down from Heaven for his offenses against God.
September 29, 1948 -
Laurence Olivier's powerful interpretation of Shakespeare's melancholy Dane, Hamlet premiered in New York City on this day.
Laurence Olivier was 41 when Hamlet was released. Eileen Herlie, who played Hamlet's mother Gertrude, was 30. Herlie also played Gertrude on Broadway in 1964 with Richard Burton's Hamlet, which was filmed and shown in a limited release. Whereas she was 11 years younger than her "son" when Hamlet was played by Olivier, she was seven years older than Burton.
September 29, 1953 -
The family comedy Make Room for Daddy, starring Danny Thomas, premiered on ABC TV on this date.
Penney Parker beat a then-unknown actress named Mary Tyler Moore for the role of Terry. According to Danny Thomas, the only reason Parker got the part was because he felt Moore's nose looked different enough from his so that nobody would believe she was his daughter.
September 29, 1954 -
The movie musical A Star Is Born, (the third version of the film, fourth, if you count What Price Hollywood) starring Judy Garland and James Mason, had its world premiere at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood on this date.
The film was re-edited several times. Premiering at 181 minutes, the studio (Warner Bros.) cut the film by 30 minutes despite the objections of director George Cukor and producer Sidney Luft (Judy Garland's husband). In 1983, all but 5 minutes of the cut footage was found and re-instated, but some footage had to be reconstructed using production stills.
September 29, 1954 -
United Artist released the Joseph L, Mankiewicz film, The Barefoot Contessa, starring Ava Gardner and Humphrey Bogart on this date. (If you haven't seen this movie, seek it out!)
Joseph L. Mankiewicz wanted James Mason, whom he had just directed in Julius Caesar, for the part of the nobleman. MGM executive Nicholas Schenck, who had had a vehement disagreement with the director, would not release Mason for the film. According to Mankiewicz, he ended up with Rossano Brazzi, "who cannot act, cannot be sensual... could hardly speak English..." Ironically, Rosemary Matthews, who was hired to help Brazzi with his English, and Mankiewicz later married.
September 29, 1955 -
The only film Charles Laughton directed, The Night of the Hunter opened in New York City on this date.
Charles Laughton reportedly worked well with the boy playing John, but did not get along with the girl playing Pearl and shouted at her on occasion. As Laughton had the camera continue to roll after the scenes were finished, the camera often caught her reacting to him. Some of these "out-takes" were used in the final editing process as reaction shots to the Preacher's character.
September 29, 1959 -
One of the first series that featured the lives of American teenagers, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, starring Dwayne Hickman, Bob Denver and Tuesday Weld premiered on CBS-TV on this date.
The series served as one of the influences in the development of the Hanna-Barbara cartoon Scooby Doo, Where Are You!. In Scooby-Doo, the character of Fred Jones was based on Dobie Gillis; Velma Dinkley on Zelda Gilroy; Daphne Blake on Thalia Menninger, and Norville "Shaggy" Rogers on Maynard G. Krebs.
September 29, 1960 -
We were all welcomed into the Douglas household when My Three Sons, starring another of TV favorite alcoholic dads, Fred McMurray, premiered on ABC on this date.
The show was originally going to be named The Fred MacMurray Show, but Fred MacMurray didn't like the idea.
September 29, 1963 -
My Favorite Martian, starring Ray Walston and Bill Bixby premiered on CBS-TV on this date.
Ray Walston admitted that he regretted taking the role of Uncle Martin. Walston felt that the role typecasted him and prevented him from getting substantial roles for many years. He took the role because the salary afforded him and his family a comfortable lifestyle. He did enjoy working with Bill Bixby and two remained lifelong friends.
September 29, 1967 -
Gerry Anderson's supermarionation take on superheroes, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons premiered on this date in the UK.
According to Gerry Anderson on the DVD commentary for the Pilot episode The Mysterons were written as an invisible enemy because Gerry didn't want to offend any aliens if life were ever found on Mars.
September 29, 1985 -
The Sci-Fi anthology series created by Steven Spielberg, Amazing Stories, premieres on NBC-TV on this date.
The title is taken from a bi-monthly, Sci-fi journal famous in the 1940s and '50s and edited by TV and film writer Howard Browne.
Today in History:
September 29, 1399 -
... For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings...
Richard II was deposed on this date,which only served him right for having posed in the first place. He was succeeded by Henry IV Part I.
September 29, 1513 -
Spanish explorer Vasco Nunez de Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean, on this date (although he may have discovered it four days earlier - I'm not sure what the Spanish Navy's stance was on the the whole rum ... question.)
How something that covers roughly a third of the earth's surface could have been lost for so long is a question that stumps historians to this day.
It's Miguel de Cervantes' birthday today. Born in 1547, Cervantes is best known as the author of Don Quixote, a cunning satire on mental illness. The work is an epic treatment of the perennial question, "wouldn't the world be better off if we were all crazy?"
Ever since the publication of Don Quixote, the idea of improving through world through mental illness has taken root in the popular culture of the west. From the good soldier Svjek and Prince Myshkin to Chauncy Gardener, Elwood P. Dowd and Forrest Gump, western readers and filmgoers have a galaxy of benevolent lunatics to show them the way to a better, purer existence. Grand mal seizures, delirium tremens, and hallucinations are merely the price of admission to their wistful world of blissful ignorance.
The sane and hard-working do not come off nearly so well in film or literature. In fact, sane and hard-working people seldom even appear in film or literature. No one wants to read about them, or spend good money to watch them go about their plodding lives, because most of us are surrounded by sane and hard-working people already and know what they're like—they're just like us, only less so.
Early to bed and early to rise may make a man healthy, and wealthy, and wise, but it won't do a goddamn thing for his Nielsens. In fact, if you're healthy, wealthy, wise, and well-rested, you're only going to piss the rest of us off. Lighten up, slack off, drink up, and spend plenty of quality time with imaginary friends.
That's the real road to happiness—or at least our acceptance, without which you have no right to be happy.
September 29, 1957 -
An explosion at the Chelyabinsk-40 complex, a Soviet nuclear fuel processing plant, irradiated the nearby city of Kyshtym with strontium-90, cesium-137 and plutonium on this date.
This accident releases twice the radioactivity of the Chernobyl incident.
Oops
September 29, 1976 -
At his birthday party, musician Jerry Lee Lewis accidentally shoots his bass player Norman Owens twice in the chest, trying to open a soft drink bottle with a .357 magnum. Owens survived and files a lawsuit.
September 29, 1988 -
Stacy Allison was one of several female mountaineers who took part in a competition to see who could be the first to climb Mount Everest.
After harsh weather conditions forced the other participants to turn around midway through their climb, Allison surprised many (including herself) by reaching the peak of 29,000 feet, being the first American woman to do so on this date.
September 29, 1989 -
Zsa Zsa Gabor, a person famous for no apparent reason and with no visible means of support (It's too weird to think that Zsa Zsa and her sisters were the original Kardashians, without the sex tapes), was convicted of slapping a Beverly Hills police officer on this date.
Gabor later complains that she was denied a jury of her peers, saying "It was not my class of people, There was not a producer, a press agent, a director, an actor."
And so it goes.
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