Showbiz History: '98's American History X, '80s Harry Hamlin

8 random things that happened on this day (October 30th) in showbiz history

Rudolph Valentino cheekily decides you can't watch him undress in behind the scenes footage

1921 The Sheik starring Rudolph Valentino premieres, inventing the male movie star sex symbol. The world swoons. Women faint.

1938 Orson Welles radio broadcast of HG Wells "The War of the Worlds" causes mass panic when people are convinced it's real.

1943 Federico Fellini (23) and Giulietta Masina (22) marry in Italy. A scriptwriter and a radio actress at the time, they will become legends.

American History X, Baby Boom, Harry Hamlin, and more after the jump...

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How Had I Never Seen..."Bram Stoker's Dracula"

By Michael Cusumano

“You haven’t seen Bram Stoker’s Dracula?” my girlfriend gasped, stopping her laundry folding dead.

This caught my attention as it upset the established dynamic of our relationship. I am the one who interrupts every conversation with some version of “What? You’re telling me you’ve never seen [insert name of film no one has ever watched outside a film studies program]?!"

She then reflected on how gorgeous Coppola’s vampire opus is and chastised herself for not owning it. This again was a reversal of the natural order. I wake up with night sweats at the thought that there is a great movie somewhere I don’t own. She owns approximately seven DVD’s she acquired by accident in the early 00’s which she stores in a dusty case next to "Jagged Little Pill" and her old Microsoft startup discs.

I immediately turned off what I was watching and popped on the Coppola film...

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International Contender: Canada, Germany, Japan, and more...

Since the last posting of this kind we've had six new submissions announced for Oscar's International Feature Film race, bringing the total to 25 thus far. We're tracking both here on the Oscar charts and at letterboxd. (We usually end up around 90 titles but we suspect there will be fewer titles this year due to the pandemic and the resulting cinema chaos.)

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Halloween Costume: "Drive" and "Fury Road"

by Tony Ruggio

Before I was 24 I never used Halloween as an excuse to tout one of my favorite movies. I’ve been a self-described cinephile since the age of 14 and yet somehow it had never occurred to me to dress up as a character from any film, less it was an already uber-famous character like Batman and such. When I discovered that, lo and behold, there were replicas being sold of the iconic scorpion jacket from Drive, I jumped at the chance to purchase one for myself and have some Ryan Gosling cool rub off on me...

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How Emma Got Her Groove Back

by Jason Adams

Oh thank the heavens, a leading role for Emma Thompson! It's been too long since we've seen one of those (does Late Night count? I never saw Late Night) and this one sounds like a doozy -- Dame Emma will be starring in a comedy titled Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, which will have her playing a recent widow who decides to spice up her life with all the things she missed during her long marriage, chiefly among them some high quality sexual intercourse. So she finds herself a "sex therapist" in the form of a young man in "his early twenties for a night of bliss." These are Variety's words, not mine -- I would be much, much more vulgar.

As I have no doubt Dame Emma would and perhaps hopefully will be! Her boozy bawdy real-world presence, the one we get to see on red carpets and talk shows, doesn't get utilized nearly often enough on-screen, so the thought of her starring in a proper sex comedy sounds like, well, a, dare I say, "night of bliss." The film will be directed by Austrailian director Sophie Hyde, who made Animals with Holliday Grainger and Alia Shawkat last year -- no word on other casting yet, but of course our minds turn to the young actor playing the sex worker. Who'd you like to see play opposite this grand Dame?