Book Review: Seen from the Wings: Luise Rainer. My Mother, The Journey

There’s an apocryphal story about the first time director Alfred Hitchcock was nominated for an Oscar (for 1940’s Rebecca).  He hadn’t planned on attending the ceremony—in fact, he and wife Alma Reville spent most of that afternoon on the tennis court.  Yet the Hitchcocks thought it might be a lark to show up for the…

My old Kentucky home

Ah. Kentucky...home of bluegrass and mint juleps.  It’s also the location of two stables that house the finest of horseflesh—one belongs to Major Peter Wingate (William H. Turner) and the other to Colonel Jefferson Girard (Josef Swickard).  The offspring of these two fine Southern gentlemen—daughter Betty Girard (Marilyn Mills) and son Larry Wingate (Ralph Emerson—billed…

“I could show you scars that would tear your heart out…”

In the fifth season of NBC’s Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, the comedy/variety program commemorated its 100th telecast by inviting to mingle with its regulars several of the show’s “alumni”: Judy Carne, Henry Gibson, Teresa Graves, Arte Johnson, and Jo Anne Worley.  (Goldie Hawn had also been asked, but she declined.)  The special also made good…

Book Review: You’re Going to Make It After All: The Life, Times and Influence of Mary Tyler Moore

As an individual who admittedly has a fascination for bits of arcane movie and TV trivia, I found this passage in a new book written by New York Times bestselling author Marc Shapiro refreshingly offbeat: At one point early in the show’s existence, The Mary Tyler Moore Show was in danger of being cancelled. So…

Book Review: Where’s My Fortune Cookie?

In 1988, I journeyed to the wilds of Atlanta’s Emory University as a member of Armstrong State College’s (now Armstrong State University) college bowl team; while there, my fellow team members and I lunched at a now-defunct restaurant (Anybody’s Pizza) and on our way back to Emory stopped by a record store to spend the…

Buried Treasures (literally!): The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille (2016)

In his 1959 autobiography, legendary movie director Cecil Blount DeMille wrote: “If 1,000 years from now, archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe, I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization, far from being confined to the Valley of the Nile, extended all the way to…

The passings parade

Facebook was abuzz yesterday with the news of the death of singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse at the age of 27…and at the risk of being thought a terrible person, I’m not entirely sure I understand why this came as a surprise to so many people.  Winehouse was certainly a major musical talent (though I will admit I wasn’t…

Gahhhhh!!!

Sometimes Facebook strays from its mission to do good...

The passings parade

Because I had already covered the deaths of legendary comedy scribes Sherwood Schwartz and Sam Denoff in a post this week, I gambled that what I sometimes refer to (and I’m not proud of this, but honesty is the best policy) the “celebrity death parade” would be a little shorter and quicker to accomplish.  However, if we…

The passings parade

This week’s edition of TDOY’s roundup of celebrity notables who’ve left this world for a better one will be a day later—and a bit shorter—due to the fact that I nearly forgot about the Vivien Leigh-Laurence Olivier Blogathon taking place this weekend at Viv and Larry.com.  So I’ll be devoting time to getting my entry in for today but I…