Sir Hannibal Anthony Lecter Hopkins

On 31 December, 1937 in Margam, Port Talbot, Wales was born a kid who became a sir: Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins best known as the actor Anthony Hopkins.

This Welsh actor of film, stage, and television, is considered as one of the greatest living actors.  Hopkins is perhaps best known for his portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, its sequel Hannibal and the prequel Red Dragon. But his movies have spanned a wide variety of genres, from family films to horror.

Retaining his British citizenship, he became a U.S. citizen on 12 April 2000. As well as his Academy Award, Hopkins has also won three BAFTA Awards, two Emmy Awards and the Cecil DeMille Golden Globe Award.

The son of Muriel Anne (née Yeats) and Richard Arthur Hopkins that he was a baker was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1993 for services to the arts. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2003, and was made a Fellow of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 2008.

It’s really hard to tell just couple of things about this actor…

Enjoy the paper memorabilia with his scary and his soothing face.

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The Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams

On December 28, 1961 it was The Night of the Iguana in New York City on Broadway at the Royal Theater!

A stage play written by American author Tennessee Williams, based on his 1948 short story premieres in NYC and ran for 316 performances. It starred Patrick O’Neil as Rev. Shannon, two-time Oscar winner Bette Davis as Maxine and Margaret Leighton as Hannah. The play was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play. Leighton, as Hannah, won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.

Two film adaptations of this play have been made, including the Academy Award winning 1964 film of the same name.

This film was directed by John Huston, it featured Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, and Deborah Kerr. The Night of the Iguana drew considerable attention for stories around its production, since Richard Burton had brought his soon-to-be-wife Elizabeth Taylor to the location set.

The preface to the story shows Episcopal priest Reverend Dr. T. Lawrence Shannon having a “nervous breakdown” after being ostracized by his congregation for having an inappropriate relationship in Virginia with “a very young Sunday school teacher.” Two years later, Shannon is a tour guide for bottom-of-the-barrel Texas company Blake Tours, is taking a group of Baptist School teachers by bus to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Well don’t expect to tell you the whole story! You should seed this wonderful movie!

Go to the theater mate!

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Aristocats against butler Edgar

On December 24 right on Christmas Eve, in 19970 an animated feature produced and released by Walt Disney Productions is released: The Aristocats!

This film is very important because is noted for being the last film project to be approved by Walt Disney himself, as he died in late 1966, before the film was released. It gained positive reviews on first release and was a box office success.

The story is about a mother cat named Duchess and her three kittens, Marie, Berlioz, and Toulouse, live in a mansion in Paris in 1910.  The landlady was a retired opera singer Madame Adelaide Bonfamille, along with her English butler Edgar. She early on settles her will with her lawyer Georges Hautecourt, an aged, eccentric old friend of hers, stating that she wishes for her fortune to be left to her cats, who will retain it until their deaths, upon which her fortune will revert to Edgar. Edgar hears this and is unwilling to wait for the cats to die naturally before he inherits Madame Adelaide’s fortune, and plots to remove the cats from a position of inheritance. An alley cat acquaintance helps the kidnapped kittens from the butler.

You can hear the voices of Eva Gabor, Phil Harris, and Roddy Maude-Roxby as Edgar the butler, the anti-hero of the story.

By watching this film you get to love the cats more…

Another wonderful animated movie from the master of the art.

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Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate

On December 20, in 1967 an American comedy-drama film directed by Mike Nichols debuts:  The Graduate

This film it is based on the 1963 novel The Graduate by Charles Webb, who wrote it shortly after graduating from Williams College. The screenplay was by Buck Henry, who makes a cameo appearance as a hotel clerk, and Calder Willingham. The film tells the story of Benjamin Braddock (played by Dustin Hoffman), a recent university graduate with no well-defined aim in life, who is seduced by an older woman, Mrs. Robinson (played by Anne Bancroft), and then proceeds to fall in love with her daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross).

In 1996, The Graduate was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. Initially, the film was placed at #7 on AFI’ s 100 Years… 100 Movies list in 1998. When AFI revised the list in 2007, the film was moved to #17.

Adjusted for inflation, the film is #21 on the list of highest-grossing films in the United States and Canada.

The film boosted the profile of folk-rock duo Simon & Garfunkel. Originally, Nichols and O’ Steen used their existing songs like “The Sound of Silence” merely as a pacing device for the editing until Nichols decided that substituting original music would not be effective and decided to include them on the soundtrack, an unusual move at that time.

On the strength of the hit single “Mrs. Robinson”, the soundtrack album rose to the top of the charts in 1968 (knocking off The Beatles’ White Album).

Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence…………………………

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Happy birthday Mr. Steven Spielberg!

As today December 18, in 1946 a man that he finally became a symbol in the movie history was born; Ladies and Gentlemen we present you through paper memorabilia Mr. Steven Spielberg!

It’s really hard to talk about a living legend. In that case we say just a few words for his early life and we “shoot” some paper memorabilia to show to you very few of the famous and unforgettable moment he gave and still giving us this extraordinary director.

Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to a Jewish family. His mother, Leah Adler was a restaurateur and concert pianist, and his father, Arnold Spielberg was an electrical engineer involved in the development of computers. He spent his childhood in Haddon Township, New Jersey, where he saw one of his first films in a theater. In 1958 as a boy scout director he fulfilled a requirement for the photography merit badge by making a nine-minute 8 mm film entitled The Last Gunfight. As a teenager, Spielberg made amateur 8 mm “adventure” films with his friends, the first of which he shot at the Pinnacle Peak Patio restaurant in Scottsdale. He charged admission (25 cents) to his home films (which involved the wrecks he staged with his Lionel train set) while his sister sold popcorn.

Well… a brilliant mind back then. Even more nowadays!

We experienced tremendous moments through his amazing cinematography. We hope there is more to come! Thank you Mr. Spielberg and …happy birthday!

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On Wednesday for a Saturday Night Fever!

On Wednesday and not on Saturday 14 December, in 1977 premiered the big hit dance film Saturday Night Fever!

The film was directed by John Badham and starring John Travolta as Tony Manero, an adolescent young man whose weekends are spent visiting a local Brooklyn discotheque (night club of the time); While in the disco, Tony is the king.

This dance care-free weekend helped Tony to forget the problems of his real life. No job, racial pulls in the local community, his links with the neighborhood gang of macho friends, and of course the continued fights with his uncooperative and backbiting parents.

This film because of its huge commercial success, was the reason of popularizing disco music around the world and made Travolta a big name. The soundtrack of the film featuring disco songs by the Bee Gees, is one of the best-selling soundtracks of all time.

The film also showcased new “entries” in the film music culture: symphony-orchestrated melodies, haute-couture clothing, and beautiful choreography. The story is based upon a 1976 New York magazine article by British writer Nik Cohn. In the late 1990s, Cohn acknowledged that the article had been fabricated.

Let’s dance folks in the Bee Gees rhythm! On a Saturday night of course!

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An American in Paris by George Gershwin!

Some Parisian taxi horns were blowing on December 13, 1928 in New York! It was in the Carnegie Hall premiere of George Gershwin’s symphonic tone poem “An American in Paris”.

Gershwin completed the orchestration on November 18, less than four weeks before the work’s premiere! He composed An American in Paris on commission from the New York Philharmonic. He scored the piece for the standard instruments of the symphonic orchestra plus celesta, saxophones, and automobile horns. That explains the Parisian taxi horns in premiere!

Gershwin on the original program notes, noting that: “My purpose here is to portray the impression of an American visitor in Paris as he strolls about the city and listens to various street noises and absorbs the French atmosphere.” And when the tone poem moves into the blues, he explains “our American friend … has succumbed to a spasm of homesickness.” But, “nostalgia is not a fatal disease.” The American visitor “once again is an alert spectator of Parisian life” and “the street noises and French atmosphere are triumphant.”

Gershwin based An American in Paris on a melodic piece called “Very Parisienne”, written in 1926 on his first visit to Paris as a gift to his hosts, Robert and Mabel Schirmer. Gershwin explained in Musical America, “My purpose here is to portray the impressions of an American visitor in Paris as he strolls about the city, listens to the various street noises, and absorbs the French atmosphere.”

In 1951, MGM released the musical An American in Paris, featuring Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron. Winning the 1951 Best Picture Oscar and numerous other awards, the film was directed by Vincente Minnelli.

A part of the symphonic composition is also featured in the film starring Jack Nicholson As Good as It Gets, released in 1997.

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Spartacus, Vincent van Gogh, General George Patton or …Kirk Douglas?

One of the legendary Hollywood “Gold Era” actors was born today December 9, in 1916!

Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch in Amsterdam, New York. His mother Bryna “Bertha” (née Sanglel) and his father Herschel “Harry” Danielovitch, a businessman were Jewish immigrants from Gomel, Belarus.

His family was poor and as a boy Douglas sold snacks to mill workers to gain some money to buy milk and bread. Later, he delivered newspapers and worked at more than forty jobs before becoming an actor. During high school, he acted in school plays, and discovered “The one thing in my life that I always knew, that was always constant, was that I wanted to be an actor.”

Douglas grew up as Izzy Demsky (one of his father’s brother adopted this name when moved to the States before them) and legally changed his name to Kirk Douglas before entering the Navy during World War II.

After the war, Douglas returned to New York City and found work in radio, theater, and commercials. Lauren Bacall helped him get his first screen role in the Hal B. Wallis film The Strange Love of Martha Ivers in 1946. Wallis was on his way to New York to look for new talent when Bacall suggested to go and see Douglas, who was rehearsing a play called The Wind Is Ninety. Douglas after the play’s run and, with no follow-up work in sight, headed to Hollywood. He was immediately cast in one of the leading roles in Wallis’ film and his immense Hollywood fate just started!

Douglas married twice. The first marriage was with Diana Dill, in 1943. The couple had two sons, the known actor Michael Douglas and producer Joel Douglas. They divorced in 1951. Then he married German American producer Anne Buydens in 1954. They had two sons, producer Peter Douglas and actor Eric Douglas who died young.

In February 1991, Douglas survived a helicopter crash in which two people died. This led Kirk, after much study, to embrace the Judaism in which he was raised. He documented this long spiritual journey in his book Climbing the Mountain: My Search for Meaning (2001).

An impressive career from an impressive man! Keep walking Mr. Kirk Douglas! And happy birthday…

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Nino Rota on paper!

Nino Rota born as Giovanni Rota Rinaldi into a musical family in Milan. Rota was a renowned child genius – his first oratorio, L’infanzia di San Giovanni Battista, was written at age 11 and performed in Milan and Paris as early as 1923!

That day, on his birthday, the calendar was on December 3, 1923.

Encouraged by Arturo Toscanini, Rota moved to the United States where he lived from 1930 to 1932.

Rota is best known for his film scores, notably for the films of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti. He also composed the music for two of Franco Zeffirelli’s Shakespeare films, and for the first two films of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy, receiving the Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Godfather Part II in 1974.

During his long career Rota was an extremely fruitful composer, especially of music for the cinema. He wrote more than 150 scores for Italian and international productions from the 1930s until his death in 1979. Alongside this great body of film work, he composed ten operas, five ballets and dozens of other orchestral, choral and chamber works, the best known being his string concerto. He also composed the music for many theater productions by Visconti, Zeffirelli and Eduardo De Filippo.

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Baby Face Nelson

Lester Joseph Gillis was born on December 6, 1908. He was known under the pseudonym George Nelson and he was a bank robber and murderer in the 1930s. Gillis was better known as Baby Face Nelson, a name given to him due to his youthful look and his small stature. He was usually referred by criminal associates as “Jimmy”.  Nelson entered into a partnership with John Dillinger, helping him escape from prison in the famed Crown Point, Indiana Jail escape, and was later considered along with the remaining gang members as public enemy number one.

Nelson was blamable for the murder of several people, and has the uncertain distinction of having killed more FBI agents in the line of duty than any other person. Nelson was shot by FBI agents and died after a shootout often called “The Battle of Barrington”. The Barrington gun battle exploded as Nelson, with Helen Gillis and John Paul Chase as passengers, drove a stolen V8 Ford South towards Chicago on State Highway 14.

The date was November 27, 1934 in a street in Barrington outside of Chicago.

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