Showbiz History: Hitchcockian Cop, Blige Strippers, and Keanu Replicas

Today in showbiz history. Happy January 11th!

1914 Dorothy Jeakins, one of the most celebrated costume designers of all time in Hollywood (12 nominations and 3 Oscar wins) who designed classics like The Ten Commandments, The Sound of Music, and The Way We Were was born in San Diego

1919 One hundred years ago today Mort Mills, was born. He's the highway patrolman in Psycho that freaks Janet Leigh out with those black hole sunglasses -- it's like looking at a skull...

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Showbiz: Norma's Win, Gwyneth's Breakthrough, and Sam Rockwell's 50th

10 random things that happened on this day (Nov 5th) in showbiz history...

1930 The 3rd annual Academy Awards are held for films released between August 1, 1929, and July 31, 1930... they hadn't yet settled on the easier full calender year system. The anti-war masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front took Best Picture and Norma Shearer, the First Lady of MGM, won Best Actress for scandalous pre-code classic The Divorcée (which you really should see).

1935 Parker Brothers launches board game classic "Monopoly". Remember when Ridley Scott was going to do a movie version? That was so weird...

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99¢ rentals to fill in the Oscar gaps

UPDATE 10/23 Sadly these deals have all expired and they're back up to $3.99 per film.

While we wait (impatiently) for the major Oscar contenders to show themselves to general audiences, why not check out an older Oscar nominees for kicks and to fill any gaps in your Oscar knowledge. Here are a few that iTunes is offering to rent for just 99¢... naturally I have to share the posters for the ones with exclamatory taglines.

• Sunrise (1927)/ Street Angel (1928) for Janet Gaynor, the very first Best Actress winner and the only Best Actress winner to win for multiple roles simultaneously (they changed the rule thereafter)
• In Old Chicago (1938) Tyrone Powers in a six-time nominated film which won Alice Brady supporting actress
• The Rains Came (1939) starring Myrna Loy and up for six Oscars
• Blood and Sand (1941) this torreador drama starring Tyrone Power won Best Cinematography
• This Above All (1942) a romantic drama starring Joan Fontaine and Tyrone Power received 4 nominations and a win for Art Direction
• The Snake Pit (1948) Olivia de Havilland in an asylum (!) in one of the original 'deglam' roles. Six nominations including Best Picture
• Pinky (1949), a racial drama about a woman who can "pass" as white received 3 acting nominations

• Come to the Stable (1949) a comedy about nuns which was up for an inexplicable 7 Oscars losing all of them -- we recently wrote about it
• The Young Lions (1958) three nominations including cinematography for this Marlon Brando / Montgomery Clift World War II picture.
• The Best of Everything (1959) three nominations including costume design for this Joan Crawford picture that January Jones hated so very much in that one episode of Mad Men

Posterized: A Star is Born

by Nathaniel R

How many versions of the oft-remade A Star is Born have you seen? There have been four now, five if you count What Price Hollywood, often forgotten because it has a different title but so alike in story beats that the first official A Star is Born was clearly lifting from it wholesale. Since the Judy Garland version they've all been musicals and as of the Barbra Streisand version, the Grammys replaced the Oscars as the key awards show moment when the new superstar wins big while her husband hits rock bottom. But more on all this later maybe..

WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD? (1932) Director George Cukor 
Starring Constance Bennett & Lowell Sherman (1 Oscar nomination for writing)

A STAR IS BORN (1937) Director William Wellman (Cukor declined)
Starring Janet Gaynor & Fredric March (7 nominations including Director, Actor and Actress, 1 win for "original" writing even though the plot was lifted from the 1932 film!, 1 Honorary for its color photography in a then mostly black-and-white world. This is the only version that was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars)

A STAR IS BORN (1954) Director George Cukor again but this time it's a musical
Starring Judy Garland & James Mason (6 nominations: Actor, Actress, Costume Design, Art Direction, Score, Original Song "The Man That Got Away")

A STAR IS BORN (1976) Director Frank Pierson
Starring Barbra Streisand & Kris Kristofferson (4 nominations including Cinematography, Sound, and Score, 1 win for Original Song "Evergreen")

A STAR IS BORN (2018) Director Bradley Cooper
Starring Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper (Oscar fate to be determined)

Since the space inbetween each A Star is Born movies is growing each time, the sixth version should arrive around 2070. Mark your calendars! ;) 

The Furniture: Top Hat's Dancing Sets

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Only 8 days until Oscar nominations! To mark the occasion, or perhaps to fill the time with something other than anticipation, let’s look back at the 8th Academy Awards. The year was 1935. Bette Davis won a consolation prize, Best Actress for Dangerous after the failure of a write-in campaign for 1934’s Of Human Bondage. John Ford won his first Oscar for The Informer, which beat Mutiny on the Bounty in nearly every category except Best Picture. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the film debut of Olivia de Havilland, won a write-in victory in Best Cinematography.

This was the last year with only three nominees for Best Art Direction. The victory went to The Dark Angel, a drama of romance and World War One. Its biggest competition may have been The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, an imperial adventure set in the British Raj. It apparently promoted European superiority so effectively that Adolf Hitler saw it three times. It received seven nominations, winning for Best Assistant Director.

If this all seems dour, don’t worry...

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