random things that happend on this day, December 22nd, in showbiz history
1932 The Mummy, the fourth "classic monsters" picture from Universal (following Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, and Frankenstein) and the second to star Boris Karloff ("Karloff the Uncanny"), arrives in theaters. It was only a modest success and received no official sequels but was instead "rebooted" though they weren't using the term back then, with The Mummy's Hand (1940).
1939 Two years after Disney premiered the US's first animated feature, Snow White, another animated feature makes it to movie theaters via Paramount Pictures: David Fleischer's Gullivers Travels...
1964 Billy Wilder's romantic comedy Kiss Me Stupid opens in theaters. It does not gain the sterling reputation of his other romcoms.
1976 Voyage of the Damned opens in limited release. We recently revisited and discussed this interesting all star historical drama which underperformed at the Oscars (3 nominations) when the studio was clearly assuming a Best Picture run.
1978 Moment by Moment, a romantic melodrama directed by Lily Tomlin's longtime companion (and now wife) opens in theaters. It's the only feature Jane Wagner ever directed and audiences and critics hated it. Now it's a cult object of some fascination since she cast the male star who looked most like her wife as the love interest.
1995 Twenty-five years ago today it was a crowded holiday weekend with the all star black female drama Waiting to Exhale the new #1 film on its opening day. So much to choose from that weekend, if Exhale was sold out. The other new films were the career-crushing female pirate drama Cutthroat Island (sorry Geena!), the vampire comedy Dracula Dead and Loving It, the comedy sequel Grumpier Old Men, the Jean Claude Van Damme actioner Sudden Death, Walt Disney's Tom and Huck, and the Gong Li arthouse hit Shanghai Triad. Were you a moviegoer in 1995 or just a wee babe?
2000 Cast Away, The Family Man, and Miss Congeniality were the big Friday pre-Christmas releases. The jam packed holiday weekend also saw the release of several Oscar hopefuls in limited release including gorgeous Gilded Age drama The House of Mirth, the comedy State and Main, the poet biopic Before Night Falls, the Cate Blanchett vehicle The Gift, and the Coen Brothers comedy O Brother Where Art Thou? That Christmas crop didn't prove all that popular with Oscar, though beyond big ticket Best Actor nominations for Tom Hanks (Cast Away) and Javier Bardem (Before Night Falls).
Today's birthday suit
Happy 58th birthday to Ralph Fiennes, the perpetually awesome and perplexingly underrated actor -- in that everyone agrees he's brilliant but he never wins and is rarely nominated for awards.
with Matthias Schoenaerts in the very sexy "A Bigger Splash"
Fiennes has been the opposite of shy in movies, dropping his pants in what seems like about half of his movies right from the beginning (The Baby of Macon, 1993) through to quite recently (A Bigger Splash, 2015). *doing quick math... okay it's less than 50%, but 10ish out of 40+ pictures ain't nothing!*
Not complaining, mind you. He's as beautiful as he is talented. And I would also like to point out that his middle name is my name so, you know, that makes him even more special. How many Oscar nominations would he have if you were in charge?
Other showbiz types born on this day: the late Oscar winner Peggy Aschcroft (A Passage to India), Amelia Eve (Haunting of Bly Manor), Dina Meyer (Starship Troopers), Spanish actor Sergi López (With a Friend Like Harry, Pan's Labyrinth), the late Hector Elizondo (Pretty Woman), Poorna Jagannathan (The Night of, Never have I Ever), Lenny von Dohlen (Twin Peaks, Electric Dreams), Barbara Billingsley (Airplane!), Pierre Brasseur (Eyes Without a Face, Children of Paradise), Vanessa Paradis, Neel Sethi (The Jungle Book), Spanish TV star Jaime Olías (The Sound of Mine), Graham Beckel (LA Confidential), singers Meghan Trainor, Jordin Sparks Thomas, and Maurice and Robin Gibb, newswoman Diane Sawyer, and the famous artist Jean Michel Basquiat who died far too young.