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Post by kims on Sept 26, 2023 22:07:20 GMT
Check out footage of the Wallendas doing the pyramid on the high wire. It is a spectacular feat. Sometime after the performance where they fall, I believe nets were required at circuses. Thank goodness. For me the danger of no net doesn't lessen my appreciation of the skill of the stunts.
See Youtube THE FLYING WALLENDAS 7 PERSON PYRAMID.
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Post by NoShear on Sept 27, 2023 16:27:58 GMT
 The 51st Academy Awards marked the last public appearances of Jack "The Tin Man" Haley, who co-presented the Best Costume Design Oscar with Ray "The Scarecrow" Bolger, and larger-than-life John Wayne who received a standing ovation.  Looking gaunt with only about two more months to live, Wayne presided over the Best Picture award which went to THE DEER HUNTER, mired in controversy over its Russian roulette scenes. Best Actress Jane Fonda, who had not yet entirely shed her militant "Hanoi Jane" persona, attacked THE DEER HUNTER for its portrayal of the Viet Cong while seemingly oblivious to the "Hanoi Hilton" abuses. Later that spring, Francis Ford Coppola's stunning Vietnam War epic, Apocalypse Now, which screens as a work-in-progress, takes home the Palme d'Or at the 32nd Cannes Film Festival. The Who, continuing in the aftermath of the 1978 death of their drummer, Keith Moon, are at Cannes to promote premieres of both The Kids Are Alright and QUADROPHENIA. The lasers seen in The Kids Are Alright also were utilized for another May premier, ALIEN:   ALIEN is one of three examples of the galactic span of STAR WARS seen for the year. MOONRAKER and STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE also get transported into the top ten. The Who's show must go on - with tragic results: Eleven concertgoers die in a crush at the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati!! On or close to the same December 3rd evening, cameras begin rolling for Penelope Spheeris' sensationalized documentary yield, THE DECLINE of western civilization...
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Post by NoShear on Sept 27, 2023 20:35:17 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! "The Tortoise and The Hare": As you wrote, TopBilled, you made up for sparse times - USC's film school! |
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Post by NoShear on Sept 27, 2023 20:38:10 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!
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. That's a cool anecdote for a ROCKY fan, Fading Fast: meeting the germ for the story! Novelizations must have been a favorite of yours. |
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Post by NoShear on Sept 27, 2023 21:06:16 GMT
 The 1970s have been called the greatest era of film, and if you were to throw the made-for-television movie into the argument, I might agree. But milestones and film franchises which continue to this day aside, movies are ultimately subjective, so in that sense the '70s aren't necessarily superior to any other decade when simply considering viewing pleasure. I'm looking to pass the A year in the movies baton off: Is anyone on the track up ahead of me??
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Post by Fading Fast on Sept 27, 2023 21:28:16 GMT
I was so the perfect age for "Jaws" and "Rocky" to be released. Plus, then, you didn't have a lot of other entertainment like today, so a movie could really dominate popular culture for awhile. As opposed, though, to seeing myself as the hero in those stories (shooting the shark, going fifteen rounds with the champ), the lessons tall scrawny me took from those movies is to never go in the boxing ring or ocean.
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. That's a cool anecdote for a ROCKY fan, Fading Fast: meeting the germ for the story! Novelizations must have been a favorite of yours.
I sincerely appreciate the thought, but if novelizations are what I think they are - pretty much the screenplay almost word for word turned into a novel - I find them a bit disappointing as they don't bring anything new or additional.
What I like about reading a true novel is you almost always learn more about the characters and story. Plus, it's fun to see how a screenwriter went about adapting a novel for the screen. "Jaws" came from a book, but "Rocky," I think, was written by Stallone as a screenplay.
Thank you again, your "A Year in the Movies" posts have been great. |
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Post by topbilled on Sept 27, 2023 21:37:59 GMT
Thank you NoShear for adding your overview of the 1970s to this thread.
It is very much appreciated!
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Post by NoShear on Sept 27, 2023 21:48:41 GMT
That's a cool anecdote for a ROCKY fan, Fading Fast: meeting the germ for the story! Novelizations must have been a favorite of yours.
I sincerely appreciate the thought, but if novelizations are what I think they are - pretty much the screenplay almost word for word turned into a novel - I find them a bit disappointing as they don't bring anything new or additional.
What I like about reading a true novel is you almost always learn more about the characters and story. Plus, it's fun to see how a screenwriter went about adapting a novel for the screen. "Jaws" came from a book, but "Rocky," I think, was written by Stallone as a screenplay.
Thank you again, your "A Year in the Movies" posts have been great. I should've typed: "...a favorite of Fading Fast, the boy." If I'm not mistaken, Sly Stallone took home no Oscar from the 1977 Academy Awards, and I wonder how the acting auteur of the Best Picture was not given at least some sort of honorary one... It's no wonder his younger brother, Frank, called Stallone's CREED snub "total Hollywood bull&#!+". |
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Post by NoShear on Sept 27, 2023 21:51:27 GMT
Thank you NoShear for adding your overview of the 1970s to this thread.
It is very much appreciated! Thank you, TopBilled. I know it probably reads tired by now but coming from a film historian/writer as yourself, it's a nice compliment for me. |
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