June 23, 1956 -
The Merrie Melodies short, Tugboat Granny, directed by Friz Freleng and starring Sylvester, Tweety Bird, and Granny, was released on this date.
Though her name appears in the title, Granny only appears in the opening scene.
June 23, 1965 -
One of Frank Sinatra's best performances on film, Von Ryan's Express, premiered on this date.
Frank Sinatra was desperate to have Richard Burton as his co-star. Sinatra was not aware, however, that the studio, 20th Century Fox, were in the middle of a bitter court case with Burton and his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, over the massive cost overruns on Cleopatra, and wouldn't even entertain the thought of hiring Burton. Sinatra had made plenty of overtures to Burton in the hope he would sign on, and he was furious that he had wasted his time and effort.
June 23, 1965 -
The lumbering Columbia Pictures bio pix, Genghis Khan directed by Henry Levin and starring Omar Sharif, James Mason, Stephen Boyd, Eli Wallach, Françoise Dorléac and Telly Savalas, opened on this date.
Stephen Boyd, Omar Sharif, and James Mason previously appeared in The Fall of the Roman Empire .
June 23, 1965 -
One of the classic Motown singles, Tracks of My Tears by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, was released on this date.
Miracles members Smokey Robinson, Warren Moore, and Marv Tarplin wrote this song. Robinson penned the lyrics; Tarplin, The Miracles' guitarist, came up with the riff. Robinson recalled: "Tracks of My Tears' was actually started by Marv Tarplin, who is a young cat who plays guitar for our act. So he had this musical thing [sings melody], you know, and we worked around with it, and worked around, and it became 'Tracks of My Tears.'"
June 23, 1970 -
The MGM WWII film, Kelly's Heroes, directed by Brian G. Hutton and starring Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Don Rickles, Carroll O'Connor, Donald Sutherland, Harry Dean Stanton, Gavin MacLeod, Karl-Otto Alberty and Stuart Margolin, opened on this date.
Yugoslavia was chosen as a location mostly because earnings from previous showings of movies there could not be taken out of the country, but could be used to fund the production. Another reason was that in 1969, it was one of the few countries whose Army was still equipped with operating World War II mechanized equipment, German and American. This simplified logistics tremendously.
June 23, 1976 -
The very silly parody of classic murder mysteries, Murder by Death, directed by Robert Moore, written by Neil Simon. and starring Eileen Brennan, Truman Capote, James Coco, Peter Falk, Alec Guinness, Elsa Lanchester, David Niven, Peter Sellers, Maggie Smith, Nancy Walker, and Estelle Winwood, opened on this date.
Peter Sellers reportedly played several practical jokes on cast and crew during filming, including once calling Neil Simon up and imitating co-star Alec Guinness and demanding a rewrite of a key scene in the middle of the night. Neither Guinness nor Simon were amused.
June 23, 1978-
The follow-up to the comedy Murder By Death, The Cheap Detective, directed by Robert Moore, written by Neil Simon, and starring Madeline Kahn, Louise Fletcher, Ann-Margret, Eileen Brennan, Stockard Channing, Marsha Mason, Sid Caesar, John Houseman, Dom DeLuise, Abe Vigoda, James Coco, Phil Silvers, Fernando Lamas, Nicol Williamson, Scatman Crothers, Vic Tayback and Paul Williams, opened on this date.
The movie was titled The Cheap Detective, according to screenwriter Neil Simon, "because the detective in those old films never got paid! Who paid Humphrey Bogart for finding all those crooks in The Maltese Falcon? He arrested Mary Astor and sent her and everyone else to jail. Who paid him? The character is always involved in danger not for the bucks but because it's his lifestyle."
June 23 1979 -
The rock group, the Knack released the ear worm, My Sharona on this date.
That's Sharona Alperin on the cover of the single holding the Get The Knack album. She posed for the art even though she and Doug Fieger weren't yet dating.
June 23, 1980 -
The unsuspecting American public got their first taste of Letterman when his morning talk show, The David Letterman Show, first aired on NBC TV on this date.
The David Letterman Show lasted nineteen weeks on the air . Letters poured into NBC condemning the cancellation. College kids hitched across the country with petitions to save him. A group of housewives from Long Island tried to block traffic in Manhattan in protest. The show won two Emmy Awards.
June 23, 1984 -
Duran Duran started a two week run at No.1 on the US singles chart with The Reflex, the group's first US No.1, was taken from their third album, Seven and the Ragged Tiger.
Instead of staying on brand by shooting in an exotic locale, the music video was shot at a Duran Duran concert. Directed by Russell Mulcahy, it's a concert footage with a twist, using the giant screen above the stage to insert the kind of random images (silhouettes with chains) that were hallmarks of early MTV. There's also a digital effect to look like water coming out of the screen and dousing the audience. It looks crude today but was pretty advanced for 1984.
June 23, 1989 -
Tim Burton's dark and brooding retelling of Batman, was released on this date.
Michael Keaton was unable to hear while wearing the Batsuit. He said that his claustrophobia helped get him in the proper mood to play Batman. "It made me go inward and that's how I wanted the character to be anyway, to be withdrawn," he said.
June 23, 1994 -
Life may or may not be a box of chocolate but Forrest Gump premiered in Los Angeles, on this date.
The line, "My name is Forrest Gump. People call me Forrest Gump," was ad libbed by Tom Hanks while filming the scene, and director Robert Zemeckis liked it so much that he decided to keep it in.
June 23, 2000 -
Aardman Animations and DreamWorks Studios released the stop-motion film, Chicken Run, directed by Peter Lord and Nick Park (of Wallace and Grommit fame) and featuring the voices of Julia Sawalha, Mel Gibson, Timothy Spall, and Miranda Richardson, on this date.
The characters' bodies were made of silicone with latex covering, while the heads and hands (or wings) were plasticene. All the chicken characters have collars and ruffles to hide the disparity between the modeling clay heads and wings and the latex-covered bodies.
Today's moment of Word of the Day
Today in History:
June 23, 1611 -
The mutinous crew of Henry Hudson's fourth voyage sets Hudson, his son and seven loyal crew members adrift in an open boat in what is now Hudson Bay; they are never heard from again.
June 23, 1868 -
Christopher Latham Sholes received a patent (US patent #79,265) for an invention he called a "Type-Writer" on this date.
June 23, 1894 -
Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, briefly Edward VIII, King of England and later to be known as the Duke of Windsor (making him both brother and uncle to successive monarchs), who abdicated his throne to marry American divorcee (and possible transvestite) Wallis Simpson, was born on this date.
Sometimes, it's very complicated to be the king.
June 23, 1931 -
Pilot Wiley Post (in full possession of both his eyes at the time ) and navigator Harold Gatty took off from Roosevelt Field in New York, in the Winnie Mae, on this date, attempting to be the first to fly around the world in a single-engine plane.
The trip (which was 15,474 miles,) completed when the pair landed back at Roosevelt Field on July 1st, took a total of eight days, 15 hours and 51 minutes. Wiley later became the first pilot to fly around the world solo, beating the record he and Gatty originally set.
June 23, 1950 -
Northwest Airlines Flight 2501, a DC-4 propliner operating its daily transcontinental service between New York City and Seattle, crashed into Lake Michigan killing 58 people.
The wreckage has never been discovered and the accident was, at the time, the worst commercial airliner accident in American history.
June 23, 1953 –
Frank J. Zamboni was issued a patent (#2,642,679) for his ice resurfacer on this date. Mr Zamboni invented his Ice Resurfacing Machine in 1949.
The Olympic medal-winner Sonja Henie was one of his first customers.
June 23, 1972 -
(Mr. Nixon did not take his martinis bone dry and that led to his downfall)
President Richard Nixon and White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman discussed a plan to use the CIA to obstruct the FBI's Watergate investigation. Revelation of the tape recording of this conversation sparked Nixon's resignation in 1974.
In the “smoking gun" tape Pres. Nixon told H.R. Haldeman, to tell top CIA officials that “the president believes this (in reference to Watergate) is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again." Nixon counseled Haldeman on how to use deception to thwart an FBI investigation on how Watergate was financed.
But then again, the president insisted that there are no tapes.
And on a personal note:
And so it goes.
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