Oscar nominee (as producer of Secret and Lies), Channing Williams was best known by far for his partnership with Mike Leigh and their company Thin Man Films. All of Leigh's films from High Hopes through Happy-Go-Lucky were produced by him, in a partnership that rivaled that of Ismael Merchant with James Ivory.
Outside of his work with Ivory, he also produced When the Whales Came, Nicholas Nickleby, The Constant Gardner, Brothers of the Head.
This is terrible news. He helped bring so many great films to the public.
"Notorious was nice, but it’s not in the color purple range" "Angels and Demons may get nominated for cinematography the imagery was profound" "District Nine will definitely win for best foreign film it made money and everyone loved it" ~ 8movies
Posts: 2714 | Location: nz | Registered: January 12, 2009
Sometimes it takes only one role to make one immortal. Maxine Cooper had a small career as an actress, mostly in small roles in films and occassionally TV episode guest work.
But she will always be remember for playing Mike Hammer's secretary Velda in Robert Aldrich's brilliant film noir Kiss Me Deadly. Playing opposite Ralph Meeker's stunningly tough performance, she more than held her own and seemed on the way to a solid career.
Instead, she married producer/writer Sy Gomberg, raised a family, and only was occassionally seen. However, she with her husband was a leading industry supporter of Dr. Martin Luther King, helping coordinate Hollywood names join in marches in the South in the early 1960s.
The son of Joel McCrea and Frances Dee, he began film career of his own initially co-starring with his dad in The First Texan (1956). He also co-starred in his dad's brief TV western series Wichita Town.
He spent a few years in supporting roles, playing opposite other young actors like Clint Eastwood, Tom Laughlin and Jack Nicholson, until he found a multi-year niche in a number of the beach party movies of the mid-1960s (Beach Party, Muscle Beach Party, Pajama Party, Beach Blanket Bingo and so on - characters with names like Deadhead and Bonehead). When those films disappeared and he no longer could play aging teenagers, he stuck around for a few roles in B-movies until pretty much retiring around 1970.
He spent the rest of his life in New Mexico as a rancher.
Originally posted by seanflynn: Marilyn CHAMBERS (actress) Jack WRANGLER (actor)
Two iconic stars of the 1970s adult film industry have died recently - Wrangler last week, Chambers last night.
Marilyn Chambers
Perhaps the most wholesome looking woman ever to succeed in adult porn, she was a model who graced Ivory Snow Soap boxes until she turned to acting. Her breathrough - Behind the Green Door, directed by the famed San Francisco-based Mitchell Brothers - rivaled Deep Throat as the break-out crossover sex feature of the early 1970s.
She made a real attempt to crossover to mainstream, most notably in David Cronenberg's early bio-horror film Rabid (1979).
She was 56, and was found dead at her Hollywood Hills home.
Marilyn Chambers, the first crossover adult star by Owen Gleiberman
It happened almost invisibly, without the overheated hype, the aren’t-you shocked/aren’t-you-titillated? tabloid media blitz that would surely have accompanied it today. In 1977, back when David Cronenberg was just an obscure Toronto-based maker of low-budget horror films (though critics were already starting to foam at the mouth a t his metaphors), he wrote and directed a nasty little psychosexual shocker called Rabid, in which he cast, in the lead role, the adult-film actress Marilyn Chambers. It was the first instance of a performer rising out of the seamy swamp of hard-core pornography and crossing over, without irony, into a mainstream movie. It would also be just about the last.
In Rabid, Chambers, who died last week at 56, plays a young woman who becomes a mutant predator, with a dagger-like...thingy that emerges, bloody and vicious, from her armpit, turning everyone it stabs into a rampaging, teeth-gnashing, id-flaunting zombie demon. In an interview on the Specal Edition DVD of Rabid, Cronenberg claims that he has never, to this day, seen Behind the Green Door, the 1972 adult-film landmark that made Chambers famous. True or not, Cronenberg knew what he had: He did an extremely shrewd job of playing off her image as a willowy girl next door with a secret depraved dark side. In Rabid, Chambers, with her wide eyes, come-hither smile, and cornstalk bearing, makes a disarmingly vivid demon-vixen on the loose. Despite the faintly tinny coo of her voice, she was, at least in this role, not a bad actress, perhaps because she identified with the perversity of the movie’s sex-kitten-gone-nutzoid imagery. A performer who’d gotten famous for being defiled on screen was now getting the chance to defile back.
By starring in Rabid, Chambers effectively blazed a trail, one that, as it turned out, went cold fairly quickly. In our own time, we’ve seen adult-film stars become icons of kitsch -- like Ron Jeremy, the burly "Hedgehog" who gets cast in bit parts whenever a director wants to lend a comedy a bit of cheap “underground” cachet (e.g., Class of Nuke 'Em High 3), or Traci Lords, who has carved out a TV and movie career lampooning her earlier infamy. And, of course, the adult superstar Jenna Jameson is a one-woman self-promotion machine. Marilyn Chambers, though, enjoyed her short-lived mainstream breakthrough near the end of the porno-chic era, when it wasn’t just a cool-cred joke or a naked PR stunt. Her role in Rabid seemed to open the door to further possibilities. Seven years later, in 1984, director Brian De Palma flirted with casting another '70s adult-film star -- Annette Haven -- in the role of triple-X actress Holly Body in Body Double. But the idea fell by the wayside (there were reports that it was nixed by the studio), and the part went to Melanie Griffith instead. By that point, it was clear that these two worlds were not destined, at least in America, to do much in the way of cross-pollinating.
At the time she made Rabid, Chambers claimed that she was done with the adult-film industry. But just when she thought she was out, it pulled her back in. Of course, the scandal that launched -- and forever defined -- her career was, in its singular and bizarre way, the ultimate case of mainstream/adult film crossover. Only this was crossover in reverse. After she’d finished shooting Behind the Green Door, the film’s creators, the Mitchell brothers, got wind of the fact that she had once been “the Ivory Snow girl,” posing in dewy sanitized soap commercials as “99 and 44/100 percent pure.” The ultimate icon of American purity starring in the ultimate dirty movie became an instant publicity sensation. More than that, however, it became an enduring myth of adult films: that the squeaky-clean soap princess -- an image that hearkened back to the Mad Men early '60s -- wasn’t what she seemed. And if she wasn’t, what did that say about everyone else? The true legacy of Marilyn Chambers, who crossed over before it was fashionable, or even permitted, may be that the lines you cross will forever be defining even after you’ve demonstrated that they’re not entirely real.
This year's Emmys, give some love for The Shield
Posts: 2427 | Location: Long Island | Registered: January 30, 2003
Cult author JG Ballard dies at 78 The author JG Ballard, famed for novels such as Crash and Empire of the Sun, has died aged 78 after a long illness.
His agent Margaret Hanbury said the author had been ill "for several years" and had died on Sunday morning.
Despite being referred to as a science fiction writer, Jim Ballard said his books were instead "picturing the psychology of the future".
His most acclaimed novel was Empire of the Sun, based on his childhood in a Japanese prison camp in China.
“I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that went on” - JG Ballard
The author of 15 novels and scores of short stories, Ballard grew up amongst the expatriate community in Shanghai.
During World War II, at the age of 12, he was interned for three years in a camp run by the Japanese.
He later moved to Britain and in the early 1960s became a full-time writer.
Ballard built up a passionate readership, particularly after Empire of The Sun, a fictionalised account of his childhood, was made into a film by Steven Spielberg.
He said of his experiences: "I have - I won't say happy - not unpleasant memories of the camp. I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that went on, but at the same time we children were playing a hundred and one games all the time!"
His friend and fellow author, Iain Sinclair, said Ballard had developed into a major literary figure.
"He was one of the first to take up the whole idea of ecological catastrophe. He was fascinated by celebrity early on, the cult of the star and suicides of cars, motorways, edgelands of cities.
"All of these things he was one of the first to create almost a philosophy of. And I think as time has gone on, he's become a major, major figure."
'Ballardian world'
Director David Cronenberg brought Ballard's infamous book about the sexual desires stimulated by car crashes to the screen in the film Crash.
The film caused a media stir, adding to Ballard's reputation for courting controversy.
In later years he wrote other acclaimed novels such as Super-Cannes and Millennium People.
Hephzibah Anderson, former fiction editor at the Daily Mail and books columnist for the Observer, said Ballard's work had anticipated life as it was now.
"If you look at the start of his career, he began writing science fiction stories and we was regarded as very avant garde.
"And there was a kind of violence lurking beneath the texture of these novels. And they've come to seem less and less futuristic and you know it's as if we're embodying, we're living in now a kind of Ballardian world."
Jack CARDIFF - Oscar-winning Director/Cinematographer.
He was 94.
2010 Oscars FYC:
Lead Actor - Joseph Gordon-Levitt, (500) Days of Summer Lead Actress - Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia Supporting Actor - Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds Supporting Actress - Mo'Nique, Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire Original Screenplay - Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber, (500) Days of Summer
Posts: 4923 | Location: Why Do You Want To Know? | Registered: November 21, 2006
Jack Cardiff, distinguished both as a cinematographer and director, was 94 when he died earlier today at his home in England.
He entered the industry as an apprentice in 1929, worked his way up to director of photography, with his big breakthrough on Caesar and Cleopatra in 1945. His color work caught the attention of Michael Powell, who used him for A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus (for which he won an Oscar), The Red Shoes - some of the greatest work in the history of the medium. Subsequent work including Hitch****'s Under Capricorn, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, The African Queen, War and Peace, The Prince and the Showgirl, The Vikings, Fanny, Death and the Nile among many others.
He had a parallel career as a director that overlapped these films, most notably for the major Oscar nominee Sons and Lovers (1960), My Geisha, Young Cassidy (replacing the ailing John Ford) and several others.
He received a second Oscar for his career in 2001.
A British director with a long career as well in the US, Annakin, 94, was one of several of his countrymen to rise in post-WWII English film, then took to making broadly commercial Hollywood films for much of his career. You might not recognize his name, but many of the films you know.
His early films included segments of two very popular omnibus films of Somerset Maughem stories - Quartet and Trio. This led to Disney (which was making films in England regularly in the early 1950s) hiring him for The Story of Robin Hood and His Merry Men with Richard Todd and The Sword and the Rose, then later Third Man on the Mountain and Swiss Family Robinson.
The last two got the attention of Daryl F. Zanuck, who hired him as the lead director of The Longest Day. Other big budget films followed - The Battle of the Bulge and Those Magnificent Men on Their Flying Machines.
His career faltered post-1970, as he went back and forth between less interested theatrical and TV movie work (The Pirate on TV, Cheaper to Keep Her with Mac Davis and The Pirate Movie with Kristy McNichol among other lackluster films).
He was Oscar nominated for his original screenplay of Those Magnificent Men.
(Jack Cardiff was the cinematographer on Annakin's 1979 Fifth Musketeer).
This message has been edited. Last edited by: seanflynn,
Although her fame rightfully is credited to TV and the stage, she had two significant film roles in the 1970s - foremost in the Italian-American multi-family comedy Lovers and Other Strangers, and then as Vera Charles in the disastrous movie version of Mame, directred by her husband Gene Saks.
There's a thread for her in the TV/Emmys section with a lot of comments.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: seanflynn,
At one point I had hoped that she would get a small movie role that could make her a contender for an Oscar in the last several years. Clearly this wasn't a strong possibility, but it was a nice hope for one of the best performers of the last half of the century. She was a brilliant comedian and actress and will certainly be missed.
Though he received his equal fame from his TV work, DeLuise's film work was substantial, and not all of it comedic.
He first got attention as a sergeant in the political thriller Fail-Safe in 1964, but already by 1966 (The Glass-Bottom Boat) he was finding his niche in comedy. Mel Brooks used him prominently - The Twelve Chairs, as Buddy Bizarre in Blazing Saddles, Silent Movie, Robin Hood - Men in Tights, The History of the World Part I. His films with Burt Reynolds, including Smokey and the Bandit, Cannonball Run and The End -- added more popularity.
Other significant roles included The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother, The Muppet Movie, The Cheap Detective, to name just a few.
He also directed two films - Hot Stuff (1979) and Boys Will Be Boys (TV, 1997).
He was 75, and apparently had been sick for some time.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: seanflynn,
Originally posted by seanflynn: Dom DELUISE - Actor
Though he received his equal fame from his TV work, DeLuise's film work was substantial, and not all of it comedic.
He first got attention as a sergeant in the political thriller Fail-Safe in 1964, but already by 1966 (The Glass-Bottom Boat) he was finding his niche in comedy. Mel Brooks used him prominently - The Twelve Chairs, as Buddy Bizarre in Blazing Saddles, Silent Movie, Robin Hood - Men in Tights, The History of the World Part I. His films with Burt Reynolds, including Smokey and the Bandit, Cannonball Run and The End -- added more popularity.
Other significant roles included The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother, The Muppet Movie, The Cheap Detective, to name just a few.
He also directed two films - Hot Stuff (1979) and Boys Will Be Boys (TV, 1997).
He was 75, and apparently had been sick for some time.
Besides "The End" probably his best bit of acting was in the Ann Bancroft directed film "Fatso".
Posts: 27164 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
One of the most legendary and accomplished agents in the business, in his many years at ICM and elsewhere he represented (passionately) some of the best known names in the film, theatre and literature.
Always based in New York, his clients included Woody Allen, Robert Altman, E.L. Doctorow, Nora Ephron, Bob Fosse, Jackie Gleason, Arthur Miller, Paul Newman, Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, Vanessa Redgrave, Susan Sarandon, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Kathleen Turner, Sigourney Weaver, Dianne Wiest (to name a small portion).
This is the kind of person not so well known to people as many actors, but his influence on the industry surpasses all but a few people, and his death shortly after his retirement (he was 80) will cause more sorrow in the industry than more than a handful of passings this year. I wouldn't be surprised if this makes the NYTimes front page (lower) tomorrow.
Nikki FInke has a lengthy and thoughtful recap of his important and colorful career:
This message has been edited. Last edited by: bocaboy7,
2010 Oscars FYC:
Lead Actor - Joseph Gordon-Levitt, (500) Days of Summer Lead Actress - Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia Supporting Actor - Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds Supporting Actress - Mo'Nique, Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire Original Screenplay - Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber, (500) Days of Summer
Posts: 4923 | Location: Why Do You Want To Know? | Registered: November 21, 2006
That was his only movie credit (and only for story; he did not write the actual screenplay).
He was primarily a TV writer with a long string of credits there, but was best known as a one-time president of the WGA, and then for many years a board member and negotiator for them.
Far better known for his magazine, fiction and golf writing (Henry Penick's Little Red Book was a major bestseller), as well as being the partner of the late Anne Richards, Shrake wrote several excellent screenplays for idiosyncratic Western-set films, none of which was a major hit, but all of whom were noted on their release for the quality of his work.
These included the Cliff Robertson-directed and starring J.W. Coop (1972), Kid Blue (1973), Nightwing (1979), Tom Horn (Steve McQueen's 2nd to last film) and Alan Rudolph's Songwriter with Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofersson.
This is terrible news. He helped bring so many great films to the public.
