Original caption: Professional frogman Courtney Brown tows a 55-foot scale model of the sunken liner Titanic during work on the film Raise the Titanic! (released in 1980.)
The screen version of the best-selling novel by Clive Cussler dramatizes an attempt to raise the 46,000-ton wreck of the Titanic, which is 2 1/2 miles down on the floor of the North Atlantic.
The model is described as “an exact replica costing $5,000,000.” (This replica ship still exists, rusting in bushes beside a water tank at the Malta Film Studios, visible on Google Maps.)
“The first and only (as far as we know) Top 10 list Kubrick submitted to anyone was in 1963 to a fledgling American magazine named Cinema (which had been founded the previous year and ceased publication in 1976),” writes the BFI’s Nick Wrigley.
It runs as follows:
1. I Vitelloni (Fellini, 1953)
2. Wild Strawberries (Bergman, 1957)
3. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
4. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston, 1948)
5. City Lights (Chaplin, 1931)
6. Henry V (Olivier, 1944)
7. La notte (Antonioni, 1961)
8. The Bank Dick (Fields, 1940—above)
9. Roxie Hart (Wellman, 1942)
10. Hell’s Angels (Hughes, 1930).
But seeing as Kubrick still had 36 years to live and watch movies after making the list, it naturally provides something less than the final word on his preferences.
Wrigley quotes Kubrick confidant Jan Harlan as saying that “Stanley would have seriously revised this 1963 list in later years, though Wild Strawberries, Citizen Kane and City Lights would remain, but he liked Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V much better than the old and old-fashioned Olivier version.”
He also quotes Kubrick himself as calling Max Ophuls the “highest of all” and “possessed of every possible quality,” calling Elia Kazan “without question the best director we have in America,” and praising heartily David Lean, Vittorio de Sica, and François Truffaut.
This all comes in handy for true cinephiles, who can never find satisfaction watching only the filmmakers they admire; they must also watch the filmmakers the filmmakers they admire admire.
Date Of Birth: 9 August 1968 – Place Of Birth:Chicago, Illinois
Gillian Anderson played agent Dana Scully on the sci-fi TV show The X-Files (1993-2002). The show was a cult hit, making stars of Anderson and her co-star David Duchovny.
The ascendancy of The X-Files matched the mid-1990s boom in the Internet, and Gillian Anderson became one of the first popular Web pinups, along with Pamela Anderson of Baywatch and Teri Hatcher of Lois and Clark, The New Adventures of Superman.
Anderson moved into movies as well, starring in the feature film version of The X Files (1998) and the 2000 film of the Edith Wharton novel House of Mirth.
In the years since she’s been raising children, working for charities (especially in Africa) and making occasional film appearances and, especially, taking on demanding roles in theatre productions.
She returned to series television in a 2012 adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic Great Expectations.
Her films include Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005), The Last King of Scotland 2006, (starring opposite Forest Whitaker and James McAvoy) and The XFiles: I Want to Believe 2008, opposite David Duchovny).
She returned to television in 2013 in the BBC series The Fall (co-starring Jamie Dornan), and joined David Duchovny again in a 2016 mini-series that continued The X-Files saga.
When the House on Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed filmmakers to testify about communism in the industry, a few held their ground — and for a time, lost their livelihood.
Courtesy of PhotofestIt
A call from the Committee was the casting call no one in Hollywood wanted to receive. In October 1947, when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) convened a hearing in Washington, D.C., to investigate subversive activities in the entertainment industry, 41 screenwriters, directors and producers were subpoenaed.
Most witnesses were “friendly” — that is, willing to respond to the committee’s central question: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”
And those who confessed to membership were offered the opportunity to name “fellow travellers,” thereby regaining their good standing with the committee and, by extension, the American film industry.
Ten witnesses — all current or former party members — banded together in protest, refusing to cooperate on First Amendment grounds (freedom of speech, right of assembly and freedom of association).
The HUAC disagreed and found the so-called Hollywood Ten in contempt of Congress, fined them each $1,000 and sentenced them to up to a year in federal prison.
All 10 artists also were fired by a group of studio executives — and the era of the Hollywood blacklist began.
Bizarre titles, even stranger storylines, cheesy effects and dead-serious acting (I am not acting in a B-movie, what are you talking about? This is the defining point of my career!).
All this adds to the esoteric charm, and even to the addiction that some people feel toward vintage movies and posters – here are some examples that might tickle you fancy:
‘This is going to be a complete disaster’ … the Home Guard regulars in a 1968 episode. Photograph: BBC/Sportsphoto/Allstar
To explore the history of Dad’s Army, you have to enter a near-military environment.
Speed bumps, vehicle checks and CCTV impede the route to the building in Caversham, Berkshire, where the paperwork about the show’s creation is stored.
These levels of security are because the BBC Written Archives are housed on the grounds of BBC Monitoring, whose duties include listening to global media on behalf of MI6.
But if the records of any TV show were to deserve such protective apparatus, it would be Dad’s Army, the BBC’s single most durably valuable programme. 31 July marks 50 years since the first episode was shown, while the last original show was screened in 1977 – but repeats still top the BBC Two ratings.
The origins of this TV phenomenon are recorded in pink folders containing yellowed press cuttings, letters from viewers and internal memos typed on paper so flimsy the letter O sometimes goes right though like a bullet hole.
The first documents trace the payment of £200 each to producer-director David Croft and co-writer Jimmy Perry for a script originally called The Fighting Tigers, based on the latter’s second world war experience in the Local Defence Volunteers, later called the Home Guard.
Arthur Lowe, was paid £170 and two shillings per episode to play the role, as the pompous Captain Mainwaring.
Gillian Anderson, Actor
