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Post by NoShear on Sept 22, 2023 22:39:24 GMT
 Everybody's kung-fu fighting, and some episodes from THE GREEN HORNeT get the feature film makeover to capitalize on it - including "The Preying Mantis" which showcased Bruce Lee's Kato and gung fu:  Everybody's streaking too:  Uh, hey, man - there are at least two underage girls in the audience:   !! Linda Blair's loss is one of eight for THE EXORCIST that evening, and William Peter Blatty, though he grabs an Oscar for his screenplay, rails against the "women's director", George Cukor, for his suggestion that any horror film is not worthy of Best Picture. Faring much better in winning percentage at the Academy Awards the next year - including Best Picture, The Godfather PART II is released to mixed reviews but, nonetheless, there are those that think it's superior to its predecessor and has shown atop at least one greatest movies of all-time list. AIRPORT 1975, EARTHQUAKE and THE Towering INFERNO are no disasters either.
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Post by topbilled on Sept 23, 2023 0:07:36 GMT
Interesting bit about Cukor.
Tatum O'Neal was so young in that photo! She's had an up-and-down life.
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Post by NoShear on Sept 23, 2023 14:55:03 GMT
Tatum O'Neal was so young in that photo! She's had an up-and-down life. I think of Tatum O'Neal and her brother, Griffin, as products of good genes but bad parenting... Not as harmonic as it appeared:  |
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Post by NoShear on Sept 23, 2023 17:31:08 GMT
  In January of the new year the first paperback printings of Peter Benchley's 1974 best-seller are copyrighted, and the cover art differs significantly from the hardbound jacket as the ascending shark gets a toothier reworking. The image will also be used for the novel's movie adaptation and rises to the high-water mark in popular culture when JAWS gobbles up theater goers and keeps us put on the sand. Its official trailer featured voiceover actor extraordinaire Percy Rodriguez and referenced THE EXORCIST: Like its phenomenon predecessor, the Academy recognizes the movie in nomination, but not Steven Spielberg who's said to have resented the snub, nor for Best Picture in the end, losing to ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST and begging the question of whether movies such as the aforementioned pair of outsized dramas, replete with tremendous audio/visuals, are less artful than films which could basically be shot as if they're simply a stage play? When considering marketing, precedent, sales and theme, JAWS will remain the definition of the summer blockbuster. Another audio/visual extravaganza played during that summer of JAWS: 
Norman Jewison's ROLLERBALL along with a creepy Peyton Place full of THE STEPFORD WIVES tell tales of businessmen having bad intentions for our future.
George Lucas, who will start up Industrial Light & Magic in May, has extraordinary intentions for our filmgoing future...
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Post by Fading Fast on Sept 23, 2023 18:41:34 GMT
I was ten-years old the summer "Jaws" came out, which is probably the perfect age at which to first see that movie. Sure, I've never fully trusted the ocean again, but it was worth it.
It might also be the first movie-book combination I did as I remember going to the library to get the book out after seeing the movie. I sat in the library for hours reading it. That's all I remember. I'm sure I took it home to finish, but all I remember is sitting in the library reading it.
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Post by NoShear on Sept 23, 2023 19:36:37 GMT
I was ten-years old the summer "Jaws" came out, which is probably the perfect age at which to first see that movie. Sure, I've never fully trusted the ocean again, but it was worth it.
It might also be the first movie-book combination I did as I remember going to the library to get the book out after seeing the movie. I sat in the library for hours reading it. That's all I remember. I'm sure I took it home to finish, but all I remember is sitting in the library reading it. I wondered about the novel and you, Fading Fast. |
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Post by NoShear on Sept 23, 2023 20:37:03 GMT
 Not surprisingly, Universal Studios adds its fearful fish to the studio tour:  Another Universal staple, Alfred Hitchcock, sees his final film released that same spring - note the plug for the Universal Studios tour:  Universal Studios also scores the star-studded spectacle of the year - MIDWAY:   ...and then sets its sights toward television by shooting some scenes with additional actors and adding fight footage for NBC fare. Of film and fight footage, ROCKY, the Bicentennial blockbuster, is the success story of the year in every way. Bill Conti's theme becomes the gym rat's theme:
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Post by Fading Fast on Sept 23, 2023 21:05:06 GMT
I was eleven-years old the summer "Rocky" came out, which is probably the perfect age at which to first see that movie.
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Post by NoShear on Sept 24, 2023 16:04:02 GMT
I was eleven-years old the summer "Rocky" came out, which is probably the perfect age at which to first see that movie. Fading Fast, I have this image of you running up the steps of your local library as GONNA FLY NOW plays, so happy to get to its books! |
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Post by Fading Fast on Sept 24, 2023 16:16:12 GMT
I was eleven-years old the summer "Rocky" came out, which is probably the perfect age at which to first see that movie. Fading Fast, I have this image of you running up the steps of your local library as GONNA FLY NOW plays, so happy to get to its books!
I have a very small connect to "Rocky." My grandfather lived in a dumpy apartment house in Bayonne NJ (think urban decay 1970s style) and one of his neighbors was Chuck Wepner, the inspiration for the Rocky character as journey man Wepner went nineteen seconds shy of going fifteen round with Muhammad Ali in what was supposed to be a "tune-up" fight for Ali. My grandfather introduced me to Wepner (obviously, not doing well if he was living in that building) in the lobby one day. What I remember most is the man was a giant. His hand all but swallowed mine when I shook it.
To your first comment, I could be wrong, but I think I asked and the librarian and she said there was no book "Rocky" on which the movie was based. I was well known in the local library. |
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Post by topbilled on Sept 25, 2023 17:01:36 GMT
I know it's hard to believe this, considering I went on to get a degree in film and television, and have devoted so much of my grown-up life to watching and reviewing classic films...but I did not watch TV for the first time until I was six years old...that was in 1977. We lived on a farm in Wisconsin and did not have a television, until one of my mother's great aunts in Chicago died and we were given her TV set. Related to this, my sister and I did not see our first movie inside a movie theater until the following year, in 1978. It was a big deal for us. And I think it was a few years later until we saw our next movie in a theater.
I wouldn't say it was poverty. We owned land, we had two vehicles...my father taught at the local high school and we sold crops grown on our land. Plus we had some cows and chickens and other animals, so there was always plenty of meat, dairy and eggs.
I think part of it was my mother had grown up in an upwardly mobile suburban home in Chicago, and when she married my father and moved to rural Wisconsin, she didn't want to be like her parents...so she raised us differently. She was very protective, perhaps over protective...and after we did get our first TV, there were only two channels we were allowed to watch, with only certain programs on those channels approved by her.
She was less restrictive with us in the 1980s, especially after we moved off the farm and had a home in town. A few years later we moved out west, when I was 13, and their friends out west were different than our friends had been back in that conservative part of Wisconsin...so my mother relaxed a bit, but she was still very strict.
It wasn't until I had turned 18 and I went to live with my aunt and my grandparents in Chicago, where I enrolled in college, that I actually started to watch a lot of films, especially classic films that my grandparents enjoyed seeing on the American Movie Classics channel. That is what caused me to want to study film, and when I was 20, I transferred to the University of Southern California and moved to Los Angeles.
My reason for sharing this is to say that a lot of what other people were watching and enjoying in the late 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, were things my sister and I were not allowed to see. But I would make up for lost time, LOL, in the 1990s when I began studying film and television. Maybe if I hadn't been prevented from watching TV and movies as a kid, I wouldn't have been so determined to learn more about them. It's funny how life works sometimes!
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Post by NoShear on Sept 25, 2023 18:49:28 GMT
Fading Fast, I have this image of you running up the steps of your local library as GONNA FLY NOW plays, so happy to get to its books! Many, maybe most people have both their fears and comfort zones. Take flying, for example... |
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Post by NoShear on Sept 25, 2023 18:49:56 GMT
 Universal Pictures' third AIRPORT departs on March 11, and its cast will later resemble something of a TCM vacation guest list:  Sixteen days later a jumbo jet collides with another in what is the deadliest aviation accident in history. Among the 583 dead are sexploitation king Russ Meyer's former wife, Eve, who still is involved in Meyer's productions. The Tenerife tragedy is 'just' one of at least three horrific plane crashes which will occur during the late 1970s period, and along with the eventual release of a fourth AIRPORT film, it's a wonder there's anybody but the business class flying by the end of the decade. Near the end of the spring, STAR WARS is first released in limited distribution with anticipation of failure, but the force of Industrial Light & Magic is with it, and George Lucas' pet project goes on to swallow up JAWS at the box office. Its supersize franchise continues today through multi-media and includes multi-talent Taika Waititi involvement of late... John Williams, who successfully scored JAWS and STAR WARS, composes five notes heard in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS of a third kind and seen being played into a grand synthesizer by its actual engineer, ARP Instruments' Philip Dodds. As with the spare notes of JAWS, they become iconic. Some of Saturday nighT FEVER's music becomes iconic as well: Peter Benchley's follow-up to JAWS is adapted for film and released two years to the month after its fishy predecessor:  THE DEEP lacks the teeth of JAWS but still ascends to number seven in domestic rentals for the year. Airplane disasters - real and imagined, dangerous undersea creatures: Where are all the tourists?
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Post by NoShear on Sept 26, 2023 21:37:29 GMT
 "Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water..."  The beach isn't the only perilous place in Universal's sphere: So's the hire wire - especially when nets are often eschewed. The Great Wallendas, the famous funambulists, are the subject of a made-for-television movie which airs in February and stars Lloyd Bridges as Karl Wallenda:  Just a little over a month later the troupe's patriarch plunges to his death during an attempted traverse in Puerto Rico, giving television audiences the real thing, seemingly much to the delight of the evening news. Those previous evening news reports of Vietnam War casualties see their stories getting told in dramas: TheBoysInCompanyC, "Coming Home" and THE DEER HUNTER all deal with the unpopular war in less heroic characterizations. A pair of genres which have been rife in film for years now, comic and slasher, get their big start that year with the appearances of Superman THE MOVIE and John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN, respectively. With help from his score which goes on to become synonymous with horror - - John Carpenter has a hit, even with Roger Ebert who ordinarily was no fan of the genre. When it comes to the top grossing movie of '78 and its genre, GREASE is the last word.
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Post by Fading Fast on Sept 26, 2023 21:48:57 GMT
I was thirteen-years old the summer "Grease" came out, which is probably the perfect age at which to first see that movie and to form a crush on Olivia Newton-John.
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