Saturday, September 2, 2017 at 11:20AM On this day (Sept 2nd) in showbiz-related history...
31 BC Cleopatra loses the Battle of Actium to Octavian's troops in the final war of the Roman Republic. Liz is very upset but it turns out Dick is still alive and he leaves his men to drown to catch up with her and work on his thigh tan! Not great, Bob.
Madonna mania, September 1st movie releases and more after the jump...
Tuesday, August 15, 2017 at 2:37PM 
Nathaniel welcomes guests Teo Bugbee, Keiran Scarlett, Séan McGovern, and Brian Mullin. We just wrote about the Supporting Actress nominated performances of 1963 but now it's time to zoom out on the films themselves and the year in question.
Smackdown '63 Companion Podcast Part 1
(42 minutes)
In which the panel plays "tag yourself" within Best Picture winner Tom Jones while discussing Tony Richardson's cinematic eccentricities in the early '60s, the movie's politics and preference for anarchy and the Academy mindset given the political tragedies of the year. We also discuss Elizabeth Taylor & Richard Burton mania (Cleopatra + The VIPs). With brief asides to: Maggie Smith, Vanessa Redgrave, Benny Hill, that awkward supporting actress presentation at the Oscars, and more.
You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you?
Thursday, August 10, 2017 at 6:48PM The Supporting Actress Smackdown 1963 Edition arrives on Monday so let's talk context since we haven't revisited as much of 1963 as we'd hoped to...
Great Big Box Office Hits: 1) Cleopatra 2) How the West Was Won 3) It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World 4) Tom Jones 4) Irma La Douce 6) Son of Flubber 7) The Birds 8) Dr No 9) The VIPs 10) McClintock!
Oscar's Best Pictures: Tom Jones (10 noms / 4 wins), Cleopatra (9 noms / 4 wins), How the West Was Won (8 noms / 3 wins), Lilies of the Field (5 noms / 1 win), America America (4 noms / 1 win) Our theory as to what was just outside the Best Picture shortlist plus more '63 goodies follow...
Monday, June 12, 2017 at 12:45PM "The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail.
Location is everything. Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel is so intimately associated with the Cornish landscape that you can go take a “My Cousin Rachel Walk” along the coast. Its cliffs and pastures feature prominently in the new adaptation of the book, starring Rachel Weisz, which was shot close to the novelist's home.
The 1952 version, meanwhile, was shot almost entirely inside an American film studio. The real Cornwall only makes a few brief appearances. But, despite the appeal of literary tourism, authenticity is not necessarily art. The location choice forces much of the plot indoors, taking full advantage of the complex and Oscar-nominated work of art directors Lyle R. Wheeler and John DeCuir and set decorator Walter M. Scott. It's more subtle, more effective.
After all, natural beauty is not really at the heart of the drama. This is a story about wealth, property and suspicion...
Monday, March 6, 2017 at 10:39AM Editor's Note: "The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. We strongly suggest going forward that you click on the images to see them in their more detailed large glory. Many older films were of course designed for giant screens, not thinking of their eventual home as phones or small TV set.
Franco Zeffirelli is not a man of subtle tastes. When he’s lucky, his opulent excesses achieve camp status. But when he’s not, it rolls over the audience like an 18-wheeler full of circus elephants. This has generally been the rule for his theatrical productions, some of which have nonetheless become war horse mainstays at major opera companies.
And so it may come as something of a surprise that the director’s overzealous artistic passion actually works quite brilliantly in his film version of The Taming of the Shrew, which opened 50 years ago this week. It turns out that his style is perfect for the frenetic madness of William Shakespeare’s screamiest comedy, heightened to a fever pitch by the deafening roars of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
The setting is Renaissance Padua, introduced by way of a delightfully pastoral matte painting. Not content simply with a city in the rain, Zeffirelli showcases a rainbow. Two-dimensional sheep mingle with their three-dimensional, breathing brethren...
