Showbiz History: Liz Taylor's Gigantic Film and Marriage

6 random things that happened on this day, October 10th, in showbiz history

1956 Giant with its gargantuan running time and trifecta of iconic stars -- Taylor, Dean, Hudson (plus Mineo & McCambridge!) --gets its world premiere in NYC. It will open for Thanksgiving in movie theaters and lead Oscar nomination morning with 10 citations. Sadly it will lose Best Picture to a much lesser movie, Around the World in 80 Days. But these things happen in Oscar annals.

1963 From Russia With Love, the second Bond film, has its world premiere in London and goes on to become an even bigger hit than the franchise launch Dr No.

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Happy 91st to Nancy Olson, the last surviving cast member of "Sunset Blvd."

by Nathaniel R

It seems like we've been losing lots of Classic Hollywood people in the past year so we wanted to wish Nancy Olson of Sunset Blvd a very happy and healthy 91st birthday today. She's the last surviving member of that stone cold classic which netted her an Oscar nomination when she was just 22. Olson was such a success in Sunset Blvd that she went on to be paired with co-star William Holden in a few more pictures. Olson has long since retired, her last significant acting gig being in the shortlived primetime soap opera "Paper Dolls" in the 1980s. 

Olson's birthday, paired with Olivia de Havilland's incredible 103rd birthday earlier this month (wow) got us thinking about who is still with us from all time classics pre-1960s because there aren't a lot of them *sniffle*.  So after the jump, a quick perusal of some gigantic classics and the (credited) cast members who are still around to be endlessly grilled about them...

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Monte Hale Centennial

James Dean with Monte Hale on the set of "Giant"

Who? Listen we're not huge western devotees but nevertheless we tip our imaginary cowboy hats today to the bygone tradition of singing cowboys on film. (You know the kind if only from watching Alden Ehrenreich work such charismatic wonders as one of 'em in the Coen Bros Hail Caesar!). Monte Hale, born on this day 100 years ago in Oklahoma, was among the last of such stars...

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Tweetweek: "We Fought a Zoo" and #Filmstruck4

Tweets of the week, curated for you in case you don't want to wade endlessly through twitter feeds each day.

I hate that this will end up being in no way representative of the content of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom pic.twitter.com/rUSj35Ec9K

— Clarisse Loughrey (@clarisselou) April 18, 2018

More after the jump including Rampage, Amadeus, and Love Simon jokes and other little morsels about new and classic films including the popular FilmStruck4 challenge of picking four films that define you...

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56 Days 'til Oscar Nominations. Let's talk 1956

by Nathaniel R

1956 is not, from our vantage point, a particularly lauded year in cinema but it's an Oscar field we tend to think of regularly for various reasons including but not limited to:

-Camp value (Ten Commandments, Bad Seed)
-Musicals (The King and I, High Society)
-Strange snubs (The Searchers received zero nominations despite Oscar's obsession with John Ford)
-Delayed foreign grandeur (La Strada and Seven Samurai, 1954 films both, were up for Oscars)
-not one but two kaiju movies (Godzilla and Rhodan)...and more.

What's your favorite movie of 1956? I don't think I've seen enough to feel comfortable with a full top ten but here are the five I like best currently (with much more to see) after the jump...

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