Archive 509

Someone new will now be running Turner Classic Movies

Pola Changnon is the new general manager of TCM.

"...Changnon, formerly SVP of marketing, studio produciton and talent for TCM, replaces Jennifer Dorian, who TCM says has chosen to leave after 20 years at Turner."

Story at Deadline Hollywood

Connie Cezon

Best Picture nomination titles for the 2020 Academy Awards

See the list at wcvb

William Powell and Myrna Loy

Amnesia is treated as a great Hollywood tragedy in some films (for example, Random Harvest, 1942) but with Myrna Loy and William Powell, it's the little engine that produces endless humorous complications in I Love You Again.

Powell is the reborn fast-talking con-artist George Carey after a conk on the head switches his personality from the strait-laced Larry Wilson of Habersville, Pennsylvania, back to George. Apparently, a previous bump eight years before created the switch from Carey into Larry Wilson. The con-man had created a respectable and ordinary character to use as a tool for a con-job, but when he got conked on the head the invented personality became the full-time one.

Now back in charge, George is forced to take stock of the banal years of Larry Wilson's activities, and Carey finds that very little of it makes sense to him: he had an obsession with taxidermy, for example, plus membership in every do-gooder club in town, both activities completely at odds with Carey's "true nature."

Ready to use Wilson's upstanding good name to fleece the town and move on, the whole program comes to a halt when fast-talking George Carey meets Mrs. Wilson (Larry's estranged wife). Soon Carey is too preoccupied with winning the approval of Mrs. Wilson to leave town, and as complications build up, it will soon ironically start to look like that con-artist Carey/Wilson may just be one of the few honest man in town.

More I Love You Again (1940)

El Cid

The 1961 El Cid is the very model of 1960's epic historical drama films, and because it was early in the cycle it set a template for both the visual drama for medieval war with gigantic armies and also box office expectations. Heston was on board the project from the beginning, and the next step was to get Sophia Loren signed up. This happened after the scripting work got further along (both Heston and Loren didn't like the early scripts, and in fact Heston said the original pitch to him by producer Sam Bronston was when there wasn't a script at all, just a trip to Spain and a pile of historical records to use for research.)

More on El Cid with Chuck Heston and Sophia Loren

Joan Blondell

How I Lost My Girlish Laughter - a 1930's novel about 1930's Hollywood, reissued by Vintage

Article talking about this unusual Golden Age of Hollywood 224 page novel at Los Angeles Times

I Lost My Girlish Laughter - Amazon

Virginia Leith, 94, has died, star of 'The Brain That Wouldn't Die'

Obituary at Hollywood Reporter

Leith also appeared in Violent Saturday (1955) with Victor Mature and Richard Egan. Among other credits are A Kiss Before Dying and Kubrick's very first feature film Fear and Desire (1953).

She had many TV show credits, such as: Police Woman, Barnaby Jones, Starsky and Hutch, Baretta as well as many others spanning from 1956 to 1980.

Sophia Loren: A Life in Pictures - 192 Pages - Amazon.com

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