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Post by jinsinna13 on May 6, 2023 13:23:41 GMT
I recently read Bobby Burgess' autobiography Ears & Bubbles: Dancing My Way from The Mickey Mouse Club to The Lawrence Welk Show.
Bobby was one of nine Mousekteers who stayed on the show for all three seasons and was on Roll Call every season. He talks about dancing with Sharon Baird, his crush on Cheryl Holdridge, and his memories of the late Jimmie Dodd and Annette Funicello. Bobby then moves onto The Lawrence Welk Show and talks about all three of his dance partners - Barbara Boylan, Cissy King (and her chronic tardiness that eventually got her fired), and Elaine Balden. It's a good read if you're a fan of The Mickey Mouse Club and/or of The Lawrence Welk Show.
Mousketeer Matinee from the third season:
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Post by Grumpytoad on May 6, 2023 23:19:39 GMT
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
A small neighboring state of a huge and ancient empire receives a message requesting (demanding) that they immediately replace their current ambassador to the empire with no further explanation. The state complies by sending someone trained in diplomacy since childhood but with no experience in the field.
Upon arrival, the new ambassador becomes twisted up in tragedy, mystery, and a fight for ultimate power.
The empire imagined by the author is a highlight of the novel. It seems to me to have elements of both the Roman empire and imperial China.
I really enjoyed the character of the new ambassador. She is smart and personable. Although taught the empires language in school, she struggles with its intensely complicated verbal nuances. This hurts her ability to not only trust, but bond with certain citizens of the empire. Unless she does, her job, life, and home are at great peril.
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Post by kims on May 10, 2023 17:18:54 GMT
UNSCRIPTED by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams. The Redstone family, the ouster of Moonves from CBS. Plenty of salacious stories for those who want to skim the book.
It is a warning to people who want to believe in a person regardless of evidence-CBS investigation to allegations of sexual misconduct by Moonves consisted in asking him were the stories true and ended when he said there was nothing to worry about.
Gives some info about voting stock classes which I found interesting because I wondered how some families keep control of corporations without owning most of the stock.
I'd call it a tale of how men and women begin to believe they are fantastic, desirable and how can they do no wrong when all their employees and others needing a favor constantly tell them they are fantastic, brilliant, etc. I don't know who said it, but when you think you are powerful and wonderful, try calling someone else's dog.
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nickandnora34
Junior Member
Just a grease spot on the L&N
Posts: 77
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Post by nickandnora34 on May 12, 2023 2:25:27 GMT
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Post by kims on May 18, 2023 0:50:38 GMT
I'm reading HOLLYWOOD THE ORAL HISTORY by Jeanine Bassinger and Sam Wasson. From the AFI recorded interviews of stars, directors, etc. they compiled this book.
Maybe I'm the last to know, but I was shocked by something Jack Benny related while talking about Lubitsch. I knew these items individually, but didn't consolidate this in my mind. TO BE OR NOT TO BE was Lombard's last film. Before she was able to join Benny and Lubitsch for the publicity tour, she died in the plane crash after a war bond sale and never saw the completed film. Benny, in the interview pointed out in the film: Robert Stack wants to take Lombard up in his plane. She asks her maid "Do you think anything can happen to me in a plane going up that high?"
I found that eerie. Also, I didn't know because of Lombard's death, the film opened with no publicity-released cold.
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Post by kims on May 20, 2023 17:39:40 GMT
More about HOLLYWOOD THE ORAL HISTORY. It's not written in essay or historical format. It starts at Hollywood beginnings in snippets of conversations from people who were there. Example from later in the book Frank Capra about the movies he made "Made to make money and last one season. Still alive and being watched and respected today. Old Hollywood: America's definition of itself."
You get nuggets like during WWII with gas rationing more people went to movies and more often. The studios which were churning out films every week, suddenly were faced with films lasting not a couple of weeks but for months. A backlog of finished films were holding on shelves because films weren't moving out of theaters as quickly. Directors, producers etc were yelling at studio heads "when are you releasing my film?"
Zanuck's intent for cinemascope was to save money. His vision was to film a movie like putting a camera in a Broadway theater, thereby eliminating set ups for different angles.
Put this book on your reading list. You get Kate Hepburn complaining about films like SHAMPOO as movies changed in the 60s & 70s, then later in the book filmmakers like Spielberg complaining about films of the 2000s. It's over 700 pages, but you can read just a few pages at a time and get interesting stories. Too bad there is no index because I want to go back and reread certain stories.
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Post by Fading Fast on May 25, 2023 5:54:58 GMT
Time and Time Again by James Hilton originally published in 1953
Author James Hilton is known today for the famous movies, The Lost Horizon, Random Harvest and Good-bye, Mr. Chips, made from his most-popular books.
Being a reasonably prolific author, though, Hilton also wrote several engaging novels that never made it to the big screen.
Time and Time Again, his last novel, explores the life of a British diplomat as a way to examine England in the first half of the twentieth century. The Empire was in decline, but its reach was still global and its cultural standards, albeit changing, were still influential.
While those big themes are in play here, the novel works because you come to care about its protagonist, Charles Anderson, a upper-middle-class Englishman who tries to do right, by the standards of his day, in a rapidly changing world.
Anderson couldn't be more off-message to our current cultural obsessions. He's a white Englishman of privilege serving an Empire now denounced as racist. Yet every era has its views, values and prejudices and ours will age with the same bumpiness as did Anderson's.
This leaves Time and Time Again (an awful title supposed to evoke the "history echoes" meme) and Charles Anderson as a revealing time capsule of a prior era, free of our modern biases and agendas, but chock full of its own biases and agendas.
Anderson, symbolically born in 1900, just missed serving in WWI, studied at Cambridge and, after achieving the appropriate grades and passing the very difficult but required entrance exams, embarked on a career in diplomacy.
Before that, though, his father, a quixotic character himself, the "eccentric" English gentleman, has to "untangle" his son from a romantic involvement with a girl of "the wrong class." The father and son's relationship, not surprisingly, never fully recovers.
These early episodes show that "privilege" only took one so far as many to-the-manner-born boys failed the exams necessary for top careers or made poor marriages. The Empire, for self preservation, was still focused on raising leaders and not on promoting self expression.
For Anderson, it's on to a respectable but not-spectacular career in diplomacy, a marriage to an "appropriate" woman who helped him advance, the storm of WWII and an awkward relationship with his son that, to his chagrin, echoes the one he had with his father.
In a neat twist at the end, Anderson's diplomatic career becomes an exciting window into the Cold War when the brutality of the Soviet Union intrudes on his usually calm official world.
That early sign of the aborning Cold War provides the perfect bookend to the first half of the twentieth century, to Anderson's life and to Hilton's novel.
Hilton shines at personalizing his characters by showing the small details, an old photograph stuck in a wardrobe mirror frame, that can mean so much to a life. You might want to think Charles Anderson is unimportant, but Hilton forces you to think otherwise.
Hilton also has a talent for weaving the pivotal geopolitical events of the era into his story. He chose a diplomat knowing that even a mid-level one would often be tangentially involved in the key moments that change history.
Time and Time Again isn't a classic or a must read. Yet it still has value today as an engaging page-turner that, importantly, provides a nearly time-capsule peek into a prior period's norms, fear, prejudices, successes and failures, all without our modern biases intruding.
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Post by Fading Fast on Jun 2, 2023 6:16:44 GMT
Hope of Heaven by John O'Hara originally published in 1938
John O'Hara was a successful and respected author in his day whose popularity and literary reputation has faded over the years, especially recently, as our culture has shifted its attention away from his main subject matter of Wasps in the twentieth century.
As a keen observer of social and class status and human relationships, O'Hara today is a window into the past free of modern biases, but of course, full of its own era's prejudices. This makes his novela, Hope of Heaven, a time-capsule of 1930s Hollywood.
It's a look, though, from the vantage point of the lead character, John Malloy, a successful novelist and playwright. He, like so many authors of that time, lured by Hollywood's high compensation, became a screenwriter rotating through several of the studios.
Malloy works a little, drinks and parties a lot and has an on-again-off-again relationship with a younger woman, Peggy Henderson, who works in a bookshop and lives with her college-student brother.
Life is good for Malloy with the money coming in and no responsibilities other than himself. He's middle-aged, though, and he thinks he might want to get married (again), but Peggy keeps putting him off.
Their bumpy relationship is the backdrop for the more visible plot of Peggy's not-seen-for-years father showing up at Peggy and her brother's doorstep. The father abandoned the family when the kids were young, but periodically still sends some money their way.
He's been a scammer his whole life, but one now seemingly trying to make amends with his family. Yet his arrival throws the tenuously peaceful world of Malloy, Peggy and her brother into disarray.
The eventual dramatic result, and it is dramatic, of the father's return forces Peggy to take a very hard look at her relationship with Malloy, especially as he keeps pressing for marriage.
While the father serves as the novel's "change agent," (in Tolstoy terms, the stranger who comes to town) as he shakes up everyone's life, the value, though, in Hope of Heaven isn't its plot, but its well-developed characters and period insight.
On the personal/social side, what stands out is the casual attitude the men and women have toward, well, casual sex. Peggy and Mallow sleep together without it being a big deal to either of them. Many of their friends share a similar attitude.
They do have to hide it a bit owing to the norms of the day, but not that much. Also, Peggy takes it less seriously than Malloy. She even makes clear, one time, when he comes back from a trip that she was most anxious for him to return so they could have sex.
For readers today used to that era's movies, where characters twist themselves into incredible knots avoiding premarital sex for fear the earth will stop rotating on its axis, it's a refreshing reveal that human nature and libidos, then, were not that different from modern ones.
Life, overall, feels closer to ours than in the period's censored movies. Not only do not-married couples live together, the young drink and party regularly. And, like today, people strive to get better paying jobs and better (or different, anyway) spouses/lovers.
It's all set in the orbit of Hollywood's studio system where authors like Malloy make very good money for doing very little work as his name on the screen credits, like the names of other successful authors who became screenwriters, is often what the studio is buying.
Hope of Heaven is a good story, but it is left open ended as the resolutions after the climax feel temporary. One could see another novella being written (which didn't happen) showing where the characters are in their lives in five or ten years from now.
It is in these characters where we also see O'Hara's writing shine as he creates well-rounded and complex individuals that you recognize and care about. You hate some, love some and just notice others, but they almost all feel real.
The era, too, of the 1930s comes alive in O'Hara's hands. Young stridently left ideologues meet to lament the state of the world, while scammers, like Peggy's father and another character who lives on a large amount of travelers checks he stole, focus on the good life.
All of this takes place in the shadow of the motion-picture studios, which made Hollywood and its surrounding areas one of the most economically successful parts of the country during the Depression.
Hope of Heaven is an easy page turner with engaging characters that reveal many of the norms and attitudes of the period. It shows how complex and similar to our times the 1930s really were. Plus, for a modern reader, it's as close to a time machine as one can get.
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Post by kims on Jun 9, 2023 0:08:40 GMT
HOW TO MAKE A JEWISH MOVIE. Fifty years ago a friend recommended this and I still have the book. Want to be depressed? In 1971 when the book came out $6.95. That was only a momentary depression because it is a humorous book and I was in the mood for humor. Written by Melville Shavelson it's the story of making CAST A GIANT SHADOW. The book is stand alone, in other words you don't have to see the film or even like it to laugh at the travails of making any movie, especially in Israel in the mid 1960's. Shavelson is Jewish, but not observing the rules of the faith. Besides humor about making a film, there's plenty of humor about running into the strict dietary laws. And though he learned Hebrew as a child, he remembers none of it and all signs are in Hebrew at the time, including street signs-he loses his way to Jerusalem in spite of the fact there is only one highway to Jerusalem at the time. His wife is Gentile and to his consternation picks up the language and writing quickly. While trying to find their rented house, Shavelson drives by the street seven times (it's that male thing of the time at least where he doesn't ask for directions) His wife tired of this finally tells him where the street is.
A one line example of his humorous writing: "Several police officers were given the license number of my car, with instructions to Point"
It's a fast easy read and fun. Give it a look.
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Post by Fading Fast on Jul 27, 2023 5:24:59 GMT
The Young Clementina by D.E. Stevenson, originally published in 1935
D.E. Stevenson wrote engaging romantic English novels from the 1920s to the 1960s that are a bit obvious in their plotting. However, they also capture their time and place well, while creating complex characters that you come to care about.
With Stevenson's good eye for detail, her novels, for us today, are fun page-turners that also serve as little time capsules of England. In The Young Clementina, Stephenson uses the story of a vicar's daughter's bumpy life to capture the between-the-war years in England.
When we meet Charlotte, she's in her early thirties, living in a tiny London flat and working long days in a small private library for a modest salary. Her life, as she describes it, is almost hermit-like, not unhappy, but narrow in scope other than in the books she reads.
Charlotte, the daughter of a vicar, grew up in a pretty parish where she was childhood friends with the heir, Garth, to the nearby manor. They were very close up until Garth went off to fight in WWI, but some life-altering change happened in Garth by the time he returned.
Now cold and aloof toward Charlotte, Garth, in a crushing move for Charlotte, marries Charlotte's younger selfish sister Kitty. Once Charlotte's Dad, the vicar passes, Garth gets Charlotte her modest job in London, but the rift between the two remains.
This brings us back to early middle-aged Charlotte working in obscurity in the library. Garth then shows up one day, now divorced, asking Charlotte to look after his daughter whom he was awarded in the divorce, as he plans to go on a year-long expedition to Africa.
The daughter in question, the titular Clementina, is an introverted child with an almost haunted mien having been raised in a household going through a bitter divorce. Charlotte takes on the monumental task of taking care of Clementina in Garth's absence.
From here, the novel is a story of personal reawakening as Charlotte, now effectively mistress of a large estate, has a big world open up to her versus her insular London world. Aiding her rebirth, Charlotte's efforts to draw Clementina out, perforce, draws Charlotte herself out.
Charlotte, along the way, is also able to unwind the mystery of Garth's WWI's transformation, which involves sisterly betrayal, tremendous misunderstandings, hurt pride, misplaced loyalties and family obligations that distort decisions and perceptions.
It's a good story, but one whose mystery you'll figure out somewhere in the middle. And while the novel is, overall, modern in style, its nineteenth-century Romantic-era view of love, think Charlotte Bronte, is dated even for the 1930s.
What makes the novel enjoyable, despite its flaws, is its ability to place you in the inter-war years in England as seen through the eyes and experiences of several engaging characters.
The Young Clementina isn't great literature, but it is a good story for fans of fiction who read contemporaneous novels to be transported to another time and place free from the biases of modern period novels.
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Post by kims on Jul 27, 2023 20:20:34 GMT
I'm unaware of D.E. Stevenson. I've added her to my list of what to read next. Currently re-reading BRIDESHEAD REVISITED. Wonder if I was British in a previous life because I seem to drift towards British authors.
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Post by Fading Fast on Jul 27, 2023 20:30:43 GMT
I'm unaware of D.E. Stevenson. I've added her to my list of what to read next. Currently re-reading BRIDESHEAD REVISITED. Wonder if I was British in a previous life because I seem to drift towards British authors. That's funny. I might have been, too, as I've read "Brideshead Revisted" twice and have seen the '81 mini series several times over the years.
I've probably read three-quarters of everything Waugh's written. My girlfriend has read, I think, all of him and most of Graham Greene too. I like some of Greene's work, like "The Quiet American," but some of it I find hard to follow.
D.E. Stevenson is not close to being in Waugh's or Greene's league, but for a lighter, quick read, she's fun.
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Post by Fading Fast on Aug 6, 2023 3:48:35 GMT
Wickford Point by John P. Marquand originally published in 1939
Novelist John P. Marquand, despite having won a Pulitzer Prize, has been largely forgotten, most likely, because his stories were too commercial for the literary cognoscenti and his subject matter, east-coast WASPs, could not be more off message today.
If you, however, enjoy engaging, intelligent and well-written fiction that brings a time, place and characters alive, Marquand's novels, mainly written in the first half of the twentieth century, are enjoyable reads.
Wickford Point has the benefit of being a semi-autobiographical roman-a-clef of Marquand's own life and writing career, giving it an insightful, albeit biting look at the often lonely life of a writer. And in this case, of a writer with a half-cracked family.
Wickford Point is the Massachusetts "farm" of the Brill family, the offspring of John Brill, a poet of some small renown from the nineteenth century whose poems still have enough literary currency in the 1930s that the Brills remain somewhat respected in intellectual and social circles.
That "intellectual" halo, and a few modest trust funds, though, has stunted the growth of the three generations of Brills that we meet living at their rundown (the trusts truly are modest) country retreat.
Each Brill is a singular personality, but none of them can do much more than talk a lot about life, spend their dwindling trust funds and be unsuccessful when they try to engage with the outside world.
Jim Calder, a cousin and, we assume, the author's doppelganger is the one successful member of the family, perhaps in part because he's not a "real" Brill. It is through his eyes that we learn about this museum piece of a family and the career of a writer back then.
Calder loves his very offbeat family even if it exasperates him most of the time. The fun in this one is the family itself and Calder's hesitant attempts to develop a relationship with a successful career woman whose existence is almost an affront to the genteel Brills.
Clothhilde is the titular head of the family. She genuinely loves her four children, but has stunted their growth with her need to have them around her, which leads to her passive-aggressive discouragement of them building lives away from Wickford Point.
Her sons, Harry and Sidney, spend their days talking about life and the people they know as the Brills still move in "proper society." You feel, though, that these present-day Brills are a bit mocked in those circles. The boys also fail at everything they try to do in the outside world.
The daughters, Mary and Bella, are the more interesting offspring as Bella, in particular, gets out in the real world, in part, because her stunning beauty is perennial currency. But they, too, can't fully function outside of Wickford Point.
Much of the book is spent at Wickford point where this family manages to occupy their days in a sort of "Grey Gardens" neverland of insular thinking in a once grand house now suffering from disrepair.
Calder, the one almost escapee, visits frequently, but has made a career as a reasonably successful journalist and short-story writer when the latter was an in-demand talent. He, though, has aspirations of becoming a famous novelist, but can't make the career leap.
One assumes author Marquand is expressing his own thoughts when Calder speaks of his fears of the empty page. We believe it's the author again when he mocks the demands of his editors for formulaic outcomes to the short stories that pay his bills.
Rounding out the picture is Pat Leighton, Calder's girlfriend, a successful self-made advertising executive at a New York City department store who is everything the indolent Brills, living on the family's former glory and dwindling funds, are not.
The modest plot revolves around Calder's attempt to reconcile his love for his isolated, standoffish and, in truth, bizarre family with his desire to work and live in the real world. The latter would also include a marriage to Leighton, who could never fit in at Wickford Point.
It's not hard to understand why Wickford Point would be ignored today, with its focus on White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, but that doesn't diminish the value of its outstanding writing, characterizations and insights into a now-lost time and place in America.
And how cool is this:
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Post by kims on Sept 1, 2023 14:19:46 GMT
Has anyone read THE MASTER AND MARGARITA by Mikhail Bulgakov? Written during Stalin's reign, it's supposed to be amusing and tell about life in Russia at that time. One person recommended it to me. Can't get it from my library system. Before I fork over money to buy it, I'm hoping for one other person to recommend it.
Thanks for your help.
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Post by Fading Fast on Sept 1, 2023 14:47:30 GMT
Has anyone read THE MASTER AND MARGARITA by Mikhail Bulgakov? Written during Stalin's reign, it's supposed to be amusing and tell about life in Russia at that time. One person recommended it to me. Can't get it from my library system. Before I fork over money to buy it, I'm hoping for one other person to recommend it. Thanks for your help. I read it several years ago and found it interesting, but being a Russian novel and one written metaphorically, it's not an easy read.
Incidentally, I found my way to it because I had read it highly influenced Mick Jagger, who read it just before writing "Sympathy for the Devil." You will easily see the influences of the book in the song.
Also, once you've read it, you'll see other references to it in literature and culture from the period as it was a popular book with artists and literary types when it came out. I'm glad I read it, but I wouldn't sign up for a second reading.
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