Personally, I wish actress Oprah Winfrey would lighten up and make a comedy like THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA or BRIDESMAIDS or THE FIRST WIVES CLUB. She's done a steady stream of dramatic, "Help us, Jesus" projects. The Hollywood Reporter told us that she's taking on another heart-wrenching project. I paid to see TERMS OF ENDEARMENT a few times when its original release. I paid to see it again after I'd attended a critics' screening so I could review it. That's how much I loved Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger and Jack Nicholson. If you've seen this mother-daughter relationship movie that covers the highs and lows of their often-rocky but totally loving relationship for over 20 years, you know what a tearjerker that comedy/drama is. And it has very funny moments.
James L. Brooks, the man who gave us THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW, RHODA and TAXI wrote and directed and produced TERMS OF ENDEARMENT. He took home three Oscars. One for writing, one for directing and one for producing the Best Picture of 1983. Shirley MacLaine won for Best Actress. Jack Nicholson won for Best Supporting Actor. He played the playboy former astronaut next door.
The first time I saw it, I laughed so hard at its wittiness, truthfulness and Shirley MacLaine's outstanding performance as the persnickety but devoted single mother, Aurora Greenway. She can be so hard to please. She's a widow and her best friend in life is her rebellious married daughter, her only child, played by Debra Winger.
Producer/director Lee Daniels, plans to do a remake with Oprah taking on the mother role and the daughter, reportedly, will now get infected with AIDS. Debra Winger played Emma, the daughter, in the original. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Daniels plans to now make Emma's husband a closeted gay man. The remake will be set in the 1980s.
Then...it's not TERMS OF ENDEARMENT, in my opinion. That's much darker in storyline than 1983's TERMS OF ENDEARMENT. It cancels out the warmth and humor we loved about the original version. How do you feel about that? I say just write Oprah an original AIDS drama script and shoot that. I love me some Oprah but this remake doesn't seem like a great idea to me.
Director James L. Brooks wanted Aurora Greenway, the widowed Houston mother, to seem constantly tense. On my VH1 talk show, Shirley MacLaine told me about Brooks' direction.
Take a look at this trailer for the Oscar-winning James L. Brooks film.
In my New York City years, I had a few encounters with actress Celeste Holm. The first one was when I interviewed her on WPIX TV. In the make-up room before the taping, we chatted about different stuff. She talked about a Fox musical she made that she felt was awful, an ex-husband she divorced because he was screwing every other dame he could...but they became good friends after the divorce...a line she had in ALL ABOUT EVE that she didn't like, and we discussed TERMS OF ENDEARMENT. I told her that I loved it and saw it more than once. Celeste Holm said that she couldn't believe Shirley MacLaine would've had a daughter who looked like Debra Winger. Why? Because Winger looked "...too Jewish."
I disagreed. In the first TERMS OF ENDEARMENT scene, the daughter is a baby in a crib and Aurora is watching her like a White House bodyguard. You hear Aurora's husband off-camera. You never see Mr. Greenway before his death, but you hear his voice. Actor Albert Brooks did the voice.
I felt that Shirley MacLaine and Albert Brooks could have produced a kid that looked like Debra Winger. And I said so. But that's just me.
If you have never seen TERMS OF ENDEARMENT -- the original -- I highly recommend that you do. Have plenty of tissues nearby.
It's a sunny remark in the 1961 film adaptation of A RAISIN IN THE SUN. When the little son presents grandmother with a gift of a large hat to wear while gardening, his aunt says "We're trying to make mama look like Mrs. Miniver, not Scarlett O'Hara."
Lorraine Hansberry, the African American playwright/screenwriter referenced two classic films through the voice of one character -- MRS. MINIVER and GONE WITH THE WIND.
One of the biggest movie hits out right now is the social commentary/psychological horror story, GET OUT, directed by Jordan Peele. The black filmmaker's directorial debut met with critical raves and box office success. He cited two classic films as major influences when he was writing and directing GET OUT -- THE STEPFORD WIVES and ROSEMARY'S BABY.
In an interview, HIDDEN FIGURES film star Taraji P. Henson was asked for her inspiration in creating the fabulous bitch-on-wheels she plays on the highly-popular EMPIRE television series. She said that she watched classic Bette Davis film performances. (Had I been the interviewer, I would have asked which Bette Davis films she watched.)
When I was a boy in South Central L.A. my parents would go to see any movie that starred Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.
STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON was a critical and box office success. It was directed by African American filmmaker F. Gary Gray.
One of Gray's favorite films is SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS starring Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster.
Online, the IndieWire site recently posted a video of director Spike Lee talking about his list of the nearly 90 essential films that every aspiring filmmaker should see. Some of those classic films from Spike's list are: THE WIZARD OF OZ, CASABLANCA, ACE IN THE HOLE, SOME LIKE IT HOT, AN AMERICAN IN PARIS, THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, TOUCH OF EVIL, THE BICYCLE THIEF, REAR WINDOW, CHINATOWN, THE RED SHOES and LA STRADA.
My point is -- we African Americans watch and appreciate classic movies. Domestic and foreign classic films.
I love Turner Classic Movies. I've been a devoted viewer since 1999. Full disclosure: From 2000 to 2007, I pitched myself repeatedly for TCM employment. Not on-camera employment. I sought work doing research or promotions or copywriting. It's now 2017. As a devoted viewer, I'm wondering why I don't see African Americans represented in TCM commercials. Have you watched the promos for the TCM Film Festival, the TCM Backlot, the TCM Wine Club and FilmStruck? Frankly, I've seen more black people in an Ingmar Bergman movie than I see in those promos.
I'm thrilled that black experts are guests in special programming that spotlights African American filmmakers. However, I would love to see us represented in the other mainstream promos and such. Bring us on a solo guest hosts occasionally. Remember the October 2014 salute to films about or shot in Africa? The guest host for the Salute to Africa every Friday in October 2014 was...Alex Trebek. Caucasian-Canadian Alex Trebek. He's an absolute gentleman and a brilliant TV game show host...but when I watched him present those nights on TCM, I found myself making a Thelma Ritter face.
If I was working at TCM behind the scenes, I would've pitched Lou Gossett Jr., LeVar Burton, Leslie Uggams (those three actors appeared in ROOTS) Don Cheadle (Best Actor Oscar nominee for HOTEL RWANDA) or Wesley Morris. Morris is a handsome African American newspaper columnist who, like the late Roger Ebert, won a Pulitzer Prize for film criticism. He won during his time at The Boston Globe. Wesley Morris now writes for The New York Times. He was the first and, so far, only African American writer to win a Pulitzer for film criticism. It was wonderful to see DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST (1991) film director Julie Dash as a guest host last December. She should be brought back. Trailblazer Julie Dash did a great job.
If you're a female and you did not see any women discussing wine in the TCM Wine Club spots, talking about classic films for FilmStruck, detailing vintage items going up for auction, visiting the TCM Backlot or getting close-ups as attendees of the TCM Film Festival, wouldn't you say "Hey, what's up with that?" My point exactly.
We African Americans also love and watch TCM. We're in the viewership. That's why a reflection of ourselves in the promos would be a welcomed sight. It's the end of March now. Let's see what April brings.
Movie trivia: Best-selling novelist Susan Isaacs is a longtime friend of mine. Her novels COMPROMISING POSITIONS and SHINING THROUGH were made into movies. In the 80s, she was tapped to write the screenplay for a possible SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS remake. With Faye Dunaway in the Burt Lancaster role.
Here's the demo reel I submitted when I was pitching myself for a behind-the-scenes TCM job.
One big wiener likes to get all up in your face. Another wiener is not as long as his meat buddies, but he's got girth. There's a genius wad of gum in a wheelchair. The gum sounds like Stephen Hawking. And there's a lesbian taco shell. They're all in an animated feature I watched over the weekend on Netflix. If you watched SAUSAGE PARTY on the job, you'd have the keep the audio very low because the language is extremely NSFW (Not Safe For Work). It's offensive. And funny. The Seth Rogen comedy posse is involved in this -- Rogen, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson -- so that should prepare you for what your ears are about to experience. You've got potty-mouthed produce and sexually frustrated supermarket items running for their lives.
All the food items think that we human shoppers are gods who take them to a wonderful, magical place like The Emerald City in THE WIZARD OF OZ. Then some of the food items see the shocking truth when they are purchased and wind up in a torture chamber called "a kitchen." Baby carrots are eaten. The eyes and skin on a potato are peeled off. Chips and cheese are placed in a microwave oven. The horror...the horror.
They must flee, return to the supermarket and warn the others. They must fight back. In the meantime, the lesbian taco warrior has a crush on the lovely lady buns that one wiener wants as his girlfriend. A Middle Eastern food item must learn to get along with a New York bagel.
Yes, there's salty language coming from salted foods and there's some freaky same-aisle sex among the products that will make you think the supermarket should've been called Glory Whole Foods, but this silly and verbally offensive feature did make me laugh. As a performer who has done a lot of voiceover work on television, I loved the voiceover work actors did in SAUSAGE PARTY.
I did not click off when the closing credits started to roll because I wanted to see work did the perfect Woody Allen imitation vocal work for the bagel.
How talented can one actor be?!?!? It was....EDWARD NORTON!
The bagel was voiced by the same man who played the talented but egotistical and annoying Broadway actor (think of young William Hurt) in BIRDMAN...
...played Inspector Henckels in THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL...
...the racist skinhead convict in AMERICAN HISTORY X...
...the charismatic but delusional Southern California cowboy in DEEP IN THE VALLEY...
...and the British doctor working to cure cholera in 1920s China while dealing with the virus of infidelity that has infected his marriage. Edward Norton and Naomi Watts were remarkable in 2006's THE PAINTED VEIL.
Top critics loved THE PAINTED VEIL and picked it as one of the year's Ten Best films. I agreed with them. But it didn't seem to get much promotion and movie audiences let it pass by. I paid to see it and the audience loved it. One woman in a row behind me said "That was a movie like in the good ol' days." I agreed with her. It was like a classic Fred Zinnemann or William Wyler film. It should have been an Oscar nominee for Best Picture. Norton and Watts were Oscar-nomination worthy. So was veteran actress Diana Rigg as a very worldly nun. THE PAINTED VEIL is a mature, quality film that did not get a single Oscar nomination. Stars Edward Norton and Naomi Watts produced it.
Edward Norton showed all that versatility and range in previous performances -- and then proved to be a great bagel in SAUSAGE PARTY. I love me some Edward Norton.
In the canon of films directed by William Wyler, DETECTIVE STORY isn't one that gets a lot of mention. Not like Wyler's WUTHERING HEIGHTS, THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, THE HEIRESS, ROMAN HOLIDAY, BEN-HUR or the three Bette Davis classics he directed -- JEZEBEL, THE LETTER and THE LITTLE FOXES. Just like Wyler's 1937 film, DEAD END, DETECTIVE STORY was based on a dramatic play by Sidney Kingsley. 1951's DETECTIVE STORY starred Kirk Douglas as a New York City police detective who can only see the worst in people. One of my favorite Kirk Douglas performances is in this film. Det. McLeod's anger comes out in harmful police brutality which he's been warned about by his precinct captain.
His once-happy marriage starts to suffer because, as his disappointed wife says, he's grown "cruel and vengeful." Det. McLeod has become the very things that he hated in his father. This cop is a case of the emotionally abused one now being the abuser. Eleanor Parker racked up the second of her three Best Actress Oscar nominations as the good, loving and loyal wife who was not a virgin when she married him. He didn't know that. He hits his wife with verbal abuse and starts to treat her like she's just another cheap criminal.
Lee Grant got the first of her four Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominations for her performance as the awkward shoplifter in DETECTIVE STORY.
There's an opening exterior scene in which a cop abuses his law enforcement power as he parallel parks. The cop's irresponsibility and carelessness loudly damages someone else's car. He doesn't apologize. This sets up the tone of the story and the serious flaw we'll see revealed in the main character who's played by Kirk Douglas.
There's a casting connection to DETECTIVE STORY and Stanley Kubrick's anti-war film, PATHS OF GLORY. That's another classic featuring Kirk Douglas at his best. In Kubrick's World War 1 film, Douglas plays Col. Dax. He's the commanding officer who tries to defend a few of his men in a court-martial. He feels they were set up to fail in battle by an ambitious general. The innocent soldiers in danger of being executed are scapegoats. The ambitious, irresponsible general in Kubrick's 1957 classic was played by actor George Macready.
You saw Macready opposite Rita Hayworth as the jealous German who marries GILDA and as the tuxedo-wearing Manhattan gangster in Hayworth's Technicolor fantasy/musical, DOWN TO EARTH. In DETECTIVE STORY, he plays a man accused of performing abortions.
The abortionist may have known the detective's wife before she and the detective met, fell in love and got married.
I have a question about a DETECTIVE STORY cast member. And, yes, I raleady looked at Wikipedia and IMDb online sites. The actor plays the black cop in the precinct. The only black cop. He has lines and he's seen in a good portion of the movie. But he's not referred to by name which made it a bit tough to look him up. Does anyone know his name and background? Was he in the original Broadway cast along with Lee Grant?
He was a handsome actor and bore a slight resemblance to James Edwards, the actor who played the African-American army veteran undergoing psychoanalysis in 1949's HOME OF THE BRAVE. Edwards also played one of the Bay Area bohemian buddies to Elizabeth Taylor's character in THE SANDPIPER. If you know who this black actor with Kirk Douglas is, please post a message and tell me. I always notice him every time I watch DETECTIVE STORY. I'd like to know if he did other acting roles.
It's dark. It's delicious. It's a modern-day fairy tale in which a handsome coachman is really duplicitous. He plots to have a life of privilege in the castle -- like a Prince Charming. SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE is an overlooked gem from 1970 starring a madly glamorous Angela Lansbury as a widowed countess and Michael York as the charming fraud. It's wickedly good and very entertaining. You will get a kick out of their corruption.
1966 was a magnificent year for Angela Lansbury. She was known in Hollywood as a solid dramatic actress who scored Oscar nominations in the Best Supporting Actress category for GASLIGHT (1944), THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1945) and THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962). Broadway gave her the kind of radiant leading lady stardom that Hollywood had not. She surprised the entertainment industry when she landed the plum role of MAME in the Broadway musical version of the classic Broadway and movie hit comedy, AUNTIE MAME. Hollywood had never really utilized Angela Lansbury's singing, dancing and comedy skills. MAME opened and she became the hottest ticket on Broadway. Songs she introduced in MAME were covered by popular singers such as Eydie Gormé, Shirley Bassey and Robert Goulet. They were big hits on Top 40 radio and the record charts. Many years later, even the TV cast of GLEE recorded a classic she introduced in MAME. Lansbury played the saloon owner, the vamp rival in the MGM musical western, THE HARVEY GIRLS, starring Judy Garland. Lansbury's singing was dubbed because MGM didn't feel her voice was sultry enough for the 1946 feature. In late 1960s, Angela Lansbury was a glamorous Broadway musical star. Stardom finally arrived when she hit 40. In SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE, the multi-talented Lansbury was not the supporting actress.
1970's SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE is not a musical but it does show that Hollywood had really dropped the ball by not giving Lansbury sophisticated comedy roles. If you know Angela Lansbury mostly from her long-running MURDER, SHE WROTE television series and her voice-over singing as Mrs. Potts in Disney's animated 1991 classic, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, you need to find and listen to her MAME original Broadway cast album vocals and you need to see SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE.
The widowed, elegant Countess notices how handsome and sexually attractive this poor young man in need of work is. He notices that she notices. She gives him a job. He's the opportunist who wants privilege and must get rid of anyone who stands in his way of living the good life in the castle. As Sally Bowles will say to Michael York's character in 1972's CABARET, that Austrian castle has an air of "divine decadence."
Play this SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE clip to get a whiff of that decadence:
I have seen this movie several times and loved it a little more each time. I always rented the VHS or saw it at a revival movie theater because it was never on TV. Well...it's now on Blu-ray thanks to KinoLorber.com. Look for it there and on Amazon.
On a weekend, I recommend you watch SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE as half of a double feature. Watch it with the new documentary BEST WORST THING THAT EVER COULD HAVE HAPPENED which I saw and absolutely loved on Netflix. It's a moving, heartwarming look at middle-age and the dreams of youth within the true backstage story of a Hal Prince and Stephen Sondheim show that opened and unexpectedly flopped with a loud thud on Broadway in the 1980s. Yes, the true story of a Broadway musical that got killed by the critics now provides the basis for a moving and heartwarming documentary. Trust me on this. So, why should that 90-minute documentary on Netflix be on a double feature with a decadent modern-day fairy tale set in post-war Austria? The famous, acclaimed producer of that Broadway flop is seen quite a bit in the documentary. 1970's SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE is one of the rare movies that he directed.
Yes. Broadway producer/director Hal Prince directed his future SWEENEY TODD Broadway star, Angela Lansbury, in SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE. It's the best of two films he directed. The other one was a 1977 version of Stephen Sondheim's A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC, a musical starring Elizabeth Taylor singing "Send In The Clowns." Seriously. Stick with SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE.
My youth in South Central Los Angeles. We'd get in the car and have a family night at the drive-in movies or we'd go to a walk-in theater and see LADY SINGS THE BLUES, COTTON COMES TO HARLEM, THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR, BULLITT or FANTASTIC VOYAGE.
At Verbum Dei, the Catholic all-boys high school I graduated from in Watts, we didn't have a big budget for extracurricular activities like schools in the then-predominantly white and upscale neighborhoods did. For us, the faculty got discounts on quality films showing exclusively in the Hollywood area. A weekday field trip on the bus to go see a matinee of those films was part of our fine arts program. Some of the dudes in my class would get off those buses sporting Afros the size of radar dishes. Our student body was African-American and Mexican-American. The movies we saw, the movies that inspired us to check out the source material in the school or local neighborhood library, did not match the TV news images you saw of young Black and Chicano males in Watts. But we did see these films and later discussed them in our English Lit. classroom:
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD starring Julie Christie...
...co-starring Peter Finch and Terence Stamp as the men in the life of strong-willed Bathsheba Everdeen, the character created by novelist Thomas Hardy.
We saw Paul Scofield as Sir Thomas More clash with the king in A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS.
We saw Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting as Shakespeare's ROMEO AND JULIET in a beautiful hit film directed by Franco Zeffirelli. That movie was such a hit with young moviegoers that its soundtrack was also a hit. The theme was tops on the record charts.
Seeing that film in high school came to my mind instantly when, during my VH1 talk show host years, I was flown to London to do an exclusive one-hour interview of Paul McCartney.
The longest film I've seen is, to this day, one of my favorite foreign films. I wish that it would be remastered and restored for DVD. I saw this film more than once in my adult years long after my high school graduation. We students got on the bus twice to go to the Hollywood area for WAR AND PEACE.
This Oscar-winning foreign film was like the GONE WITH THE WIND of Russia in that there was a 5 year search for the perfect actress to play the young and lovely Natasha. Sergei Bondarchuk, the actor who portrayed Pierre in the film, directed this epic WAR AND PEACE. He also co-wrote the screenplay adaptation of the Tolstoy classic. Man, what a great film.
The film ran about 7 hours and there's not a dull minute in it, as far as I'm concerned. It was so long that ticket buyers saw the first half one week and then returned to see the last week the following week. Our English Lit. class was told by the principal that we had to attend the first half. If we did not care to see the last half, we'd need a note from a parent or guardian and we'd be excused.
Every single guy except one returned to the see the second half. The one who did not join us had a medical excuse. He'd broken his ankle on campus during football practice. Verbum Dei High School still stands in Watts. The Watts Riots of the 1960s happened just a few years before we started high school. This was our Watts community when that rebellion made national headlines.
Our family lived in the curfew area. I started there and eventually went to London to meet one of The Beatles..."with a little help from my friends" and parents and teachers along the way.
Those were quality films that we African-American and Mexican-American high school students in South Central L.A. went to see on fine arts field trips. I'm still proud to have been in that class. And I'm grateful to the teachers who connected us to the arts in and out of the classroom.
I owe a great deal of the success I've had in my TV career to arts education in school.
She was one talented and under-utilized Hollywood actress. If Anne Bancroft had not been available, Lola Albright would have made a great Mrs. Robinson in THE GRADUATE. That's my opinion. The entertainment news came that Lola Alright passed away peacefully in upscale Toluca Lake, California this week. She was 92.
I picked up so much of love for classic films from Mom and Dad. Not just Hollywood films but foreign ones too. Mom worked as a registered nurse. Dad worked at the main post office in downtown L.A. On the rare times Mom had a weekday off from work, she was never one to watch daytime television unless to see a newscast or a special news presentation. During a Christmas or summer vacation from school, I'd be the one watching a classic film on daytime TV. Back then, long before cable and VHS tapes and DVDs and home entertainment hook-ups, independent local TV stations and the network affiliates went into their libraries and played old movies to fill up programming time. If I was ever watching an old movie in the daytime and Mom stopped what she was doing to watch it with me or stopped and, said the name of the star and smiled, I knew the movie and/or the star was significant. If NOW, VOYAGER was on, Mom would stand and look at the TV like she was under a hypnotic spell. I loved those moments. If I was watching an old movie and if Mom walked into the living room, saw the TV, paused and said "Oooh, Stanwyck" or "Oooh, Ingrid Bergman," "Brando" or "Mmmm, William Holden," I knew I should pay attention to the work of those actors.
I was especially fascinated at how much a fan Mom was of actresses who were not big stars in the Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn Hollywood sense, but they were women whose talent and work excited her. Actresses like Simone Signoret, Lilli Palmer and Patricia Neal. One such actress was Lola Albright.
Mom always said, "Hollywood should have given Lola Albright the kind of good scripts that usually went to Barbara Stanwyck." As I got older and my passion for classic films deepened, I came to agree totally with my mother on that. Look at Lola Albright as Kirk Douglas' leading lady in the boxing drama, CHAMPION (1949).
She's the long, cool, classy blonde we see cuddling and smooching Frank Sinatra in the opening scene of THE TENDER TRAP, a romantic comedy that always acts on me like a tasty tonic. That is one of my favorite go-to feel-good films from the 1950s.
Mom loved watching her on the hit TV private detective series, PETER GUNN. Blake Edwards created the series, Henry Mancini supplied the jazzy and very popular theme music that opened each episode. Lola Albright played the private eye's girlfriend, a jazz club singer.
On TV, Lola Albright got to do what Hollywood films should have let her do -- she sang. Here she is in a clip from PETER GUNN. Craig Stevens played Peter Gunn.
Albright was such a good vocalist that she got a contract and cut record albums in the 1950s.
MGM let her sing for a few seconds. In the open of EASTER PARADE (1948), she's one of the hat models who sings "Happy Easter" to Fred Astaire.
Watch the 1961 drama, A COLD WIND IN AUGUST, and you will see more of what a terrific actress she was. She played the hip middle-aged stripper who falls for a guy who's almost 18.
For her performance in the 1966 satire of American teen culture, LORD LOVE A DUCK, Lola Albright won the Berlin International Film Festival for Best Actress.
She was married three times. Her second husband was veteran film actor Jack Carson during his A STAR IS BORN (1954) and CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958) period.
