July 16, 1948 -
John Huston's version of Maxwell Anderson's play, Key Largo, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall premiered in New York on this date.
Although they played on-screen enemies, off-screen Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson treated each other with great respect. Bogart insisted Robinson be treated like a major star, and he would not come to the set until Robinson was ready. Often, he would go to Robinson's trailer to personally escort him to the set.
July 16, 1951 -
One of the best adaptations of a Charles Dickens' novel, David Lean's Oliver Twist was released in the US on this date.
In his search to find the perfect Oliver, David Lean held an open audition at Victoria Palace in which he received around one thousand five hundred applications and interviewed all but eighty of them. Not one matched the image he had in mind for Oliver but in a stroke of luck, agent Ted Lloyd spotted the ideal candidate, John Howard Davies, at the home of an associate.
July 16, 1958 -
The classic Vincent Price Sci-Fi film, The Fly, opened in San Francisco on this date.
Although many people swear they have seen this film in black and white, they never have. This is sometimes referred to as the "Mandela Effect", which is simply a false memory. It's extremely common. The Fly was only ever filmed and shown in color. However, the sequels Return of the Fly and Curse of the Fly are in black and white. This is likely where the confusion comes from, or they might have watched it on a black & white television, which were common through the 1980s.
July 16, 1966 -
Tommy James and the Shondells' single Hanky Panky goes to No. #1 of the Billboard Charts on this date.
Tommy James & the Shondells initially formed in 1959 as Tom and the Tornadoes, with the then 12-year-old Tommy Jackson as lead singer. In 1963, he renamed the band The Shondells, after one of his idols, guitarist Troy Shondell. At first, they played straightforward rock and roll (as their first hit proves), but soon became involved in the budding Bubblegum music movement. From 1968, the group members tried themselves as songwriters, penning the psychedelic classic Crimson And Clover. The group carried on with constant success until early 1970, when James became exhausted from the strenuous touring and decided to drop out.
July 16, 1974 –
In TV’s first live suicide, news presenter Christine Chubbuck, during her TV broadcast, suddenly stopped reading the teleprompter and said, “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living color, you are going to see another first: an attempted suicide.”
July 16, 1999 -
Stanley Kubrick final film, Eyes Wide Shut, was released on this date.
The film is notoriously known for its secrecy during production and the secrecy even divided the two main stars, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. To exaggerate the distrust between their fictional husband and wife, director Stanley Kubrick would direct each actor separately and forbid them to share notes. In one painful example, for just one minute of final footage where Alice makes love to a handsome naval officer-an imaginary affair that haunts Bill over the course of the film-Kubrick demanded that Kidman shoot six days of naked sex scenes with a male model. Not only did he ask the pair to pose in over fifty erotic positions, he banned Cruise from the set and forbade Kidman to assuage her husband's tension by telling him what happened during the shoot.
July 16, 2000 -
Coldplay went to No. #1 on the UK album charts on this date with their debut release Parachutes.
The album produced four singles: Shiver, Yellow, Trouble, and Don't Panic. Parachutes later went on to earn the British outfit their first Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album in 2002.
Another book from the back shelves of The ACME Library
Today in History:
July 16, 1054 -
The 'Great Schism' between the Western and Eastern churches began over rival claims of universal pre-eminence.
Remember kids, there's no schism like a great schism.
(In 1965, 911 years later, Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I met to declare an end to the schism.)
Mary Baker Eddy was born on this date in 1821.
Ms. Eddy invented Christian Science, and was elected to the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1995 for having been the only American woman to found a worldwide religion without exposing her breasts.
July 16, 1860 -
A decree from Emperor Norton I of San Francisco, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, ordered the dissolution of the United States of America on this date.
July 16, 1945 -
...If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One - I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.... - thus began the Atomic Age.
Fittingly, in a desert named Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death,) code-named Trinity, the first experimental plutonium bomb (The Gadget) was detonated in a United States test of an atomic explosion at Alamogordo Air Base, Los Alamos, New Mexico on this date. The explosion yields the equivalent 18,000 tons of TNT.
The highly anticipated new bio-pix about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project opens next week.
July 16, 1951 -
The Catcher in the Rye was published 72 years ago today. The book contained secret code words by means of which its author, J.D. Salinger, was able to communicate diabolical commands to his evil minions.
Exactly six years after the Trinity test,
and fourteen years later, the tunnel connecting France and Italy through Mont Blanc was opened to the public.
Draw your own conclusions.
Salinger was a one-hit wonder. (He did write several other books, but these are of interest only to insomniacs and those with wobbly furniture.) The Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951, and Salinger subsequently hid himself away in the hills of Vermont, emerging from this self-imposed cloister only briefly, to serve as Prime Minister of Canada and then again, to appear as a corpse at his own funeral. For nearly half a century, The Catcher in the Rye has captured the imagination of the American teenager like no other book without pictures.
Holden Caulfield, the hero and narrator of Salinger's slim classic, may be the finest portrait of twentieth-century American teenage angst bequeathed to posterity.
Either him or Archie, it's hard to say.
July 16, 1964 -
In accepting the Republican presidential nomination in San Francisco, Barry M. Goldwater said "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" and that "moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
Goldwater's speech ultimately doomed his candidacy but revived the American Conservative movement and gave birth to the political rise of Ronald Reagan.
July 16, 1969 -
54 years ago on this date, the 363-foot-tall Apollo 11 space vehicle was launched from Pad A, Launch Complex 39, Kennedy Space Center, at 9:37 a.m. (As I have gotten older, I have only now put it together that some sick puppies at NASA (probably some of the 'Good Germans') arranged to have the launch on the anniversary of the Trinity test.)
It carried Mission Commander Neil Alden Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin Eugene 'Buzz' Aldrin, Jr.
July 16, 1973 -
In testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (the Ervin Committee on Watergate), former presidential assistant Alexander Butterfield disclosed that President Richard Nixon had tape recorded all of his conversations in the White House and Executive Office Building.
Bad, Nixon, bad.
July 16, 1999 -
24 years ago today, John F.Kennedy Jr. was killed along with his wife Carolyn and sister-in-law Lauren Bessette when the aircraft he was piloting crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. (Don't hitch a ride with a Kennedy.)
He was flying a Piper Saratoga II HP from Essex County Airport in New Jersey to Martha's Vineyard. Kennedy and his wife were traveling together to the wedding of his cousin Rory in Hyannis, Massachusetts, while Lauren was to have been dropped off at Martha's Vineyard en route.
And so it goes.
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