#CINEMA-SHOWBIZ

[bitter69uk]

Born on this day 120 years ago in Los Angeles’ Chinatown: the truly great trailblazing Chinese American screen diva of the twenties and thirties, stage and television actress and cabaret star Anna May Wong (née Wong Liu Tsong, 3 January 1905 – 10 February 1961. It’s somehow perfect that her Chinese name translates as “Yellow Frosted Willow”). I know the sleek, exquisite and alluring Wong best for the silent British film Piccadilly (1929), as Marlene Dietrich’s insolent travel companion in the Josef von Sternberg masterpiece Shanghai Express (1932), the b-movie Impact (1949) and her final screen appearance (a regrettably demeaning one) as Lana Turner’s sinister housekeeper in Portrait in Black (1960). Her A-list showbiz years were over by World War II but considering the limited options available to her (onscreen interracial romances were forbidden under the Hays Code; the practice of “yellow face” was widespread (Myrna Loy, for example, routinely portrayed Asian women early in her career)), Wong’s achievements are remarkable. As Richard Corliss concludes in a 2005 Time magazine reappraisal (“Anna May Wong Did It Right”), “All this for an actress who by convention was not allowed to kiss her leading man. All this for a Hollywood star who, at the peak of her popularity, could not have bought a house in Beverly Hills. All this for a woman no white man could legally have married in her home state until 1947.” One fun theory is that Wong may have inspired a love-struck Eric Maschwitz’s besotted lyrics to the 1935 standard “These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You).” Pic: portrait of Anna May Wong by Man Ray, 1930.

[luvinaeverdene]

42nd Street (1933) Directed by Lloyd Bacon

[lifewithaview]

Michael Keaton in Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)

Dir.Alejandro G. Iñárritu

Actor Riggan Thomson is most famous for his movie role from over twenty years ago of the comic book superhero Birdman in the blockbuster movie of the same name and its two equally popular sequels. His association with the role took over his life, where Birdman is more renowned than "Riggan Thomson" the actor. Now past middle age, Riggan is trying to establish himself as a true artist by writing, directing, starring in and co-producing with his best friend Jake what is his Broadway debut, an adaptation of Raymond Carver's story, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. He is staking his name, what little artistic reputation that comes with that name and his life savings on the project, and as such will do anything needed to make the play a success. As he and Jake go through the process of the previews toward opening night, Riggan runs into several issues: needing to find a replacement for the integral supporting male role the night before the first preview; hiring the talented Broadway name, Mike Shiner, for that role, Mike who ends up being difficult to work with and who may end up overshadowing Riggan in the play; having to deal potentially with a lawsuit based on one of his actions to ensure success; needing to be there for his daughter, Sam, who he has hired to be his production assistant and who has just come out of drug rehab; and pleasing the New York Times critic, Tabitha Dickinson, who wants to use any excuse to give the play a scathing review which in turn would close the show after the opening night performance. But Riggan's biggest problem may be his own insecurities, which are manifested by him constantly hearing what he believes to be the truth from the voice of his Birdman character, who he often battles both internally and externally.

*Mike Shiner: Popularity is the slutty little cousin of prestige.

[filmcourage]

How To Get Out Of A Creative Slump - Troy DeVolld

Watch the video interview on Youtube here.

[alpha-mag-media]

How Paris Fury is the ultimate party planner – from pop-up cinemas in the garden to ‘£5k’ beautiful balloon arches | In Trend Today

How Paris Fury is the ultimate party planner – from pop-up cinemas in the garden to ‘£5k’ beautiful balloon arches Read Full Text or Full Article on MAG NEWS

[ur-mag]

How Paris Fury is the ultimate party planner – from pop-up cinemas in the garden to ‘£5k’ beautiful balloon arches | In Trend Today

How Paris Fury is the ultimate party planner – from pop-up cinemas in the garden to ‘£5k’ beautiful balloon arches Read Full Text or Full Article on MAG NEWS

[harusphotos]

PILLOLE DI SHOWBIZ: TU VÒ FARE L'ITALIANO (FAMOSO)

È oramai una prassi consolidata, da parte degli Studios hollywoodiani, di guardare con estremo interesse alle vite di grandi uomini e grandi donne nostrani.

Così, dopo la trasposizione controversa del delitto #Gucci, Venezia ha salutato con calore il kolossal incentrato su una determinata porzione di vita del patron di #Ferrari, interpretato - ironia della sorte - da quell' #adamdriver già protagonista di #houseofgucci.

Tributo doveroso o rappresentazione "macchiettistica" dei nostri, seppur leggendari, connazionali? Contro l'idea di schierare star americane per realizzare biopic "tricolore" si è schierato, senza mezzi termini, il nostro #pierfrancescosavino : "Non si capisce perché non io ma attori di questo livello non sono coinvolti in questo genere di film che invece affidano ad attori stranieri lontani dai protagonisti reali delle storie", ha tuonato dal #Lido l'attore italiano tanto amato negli USA, sollevando un polverone destinato a non disperdersi troppo presto.

E voi, da che parte state?

#pilloledishowbiz #festivaldelcinemadivenezia #pubblicista #blogger #copywriter #matryoshka #cinema #michaelmann #italiavsusa #harusphotos

Fonte foto e citazione: @fanpage.it

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[margaretemilyme]

I've just updated my webpage with some great articles. Check it out https://t.co/EtLot5u0xh #ai #machinelearning

I've just updated my webpage with some great articles. Check it out https://t.co/EtLot5u0xh #ai #machinelearning

— Fresh Bros™ (@FreshBros_) Mar 29, 2023

from Twitter https://twitter.com/FreshBros_ March 28, 2023 at 09:04PM

[bitter69uk]

In Memoriam: Italian sex goddess Gina Lollobrigida (née Luigia Lollobrigida, 4 July 1927- 16 January 2023) died two years ago today. Alongside her arch-rival Sophia Loren, in the fifties and sixties “La Lollo” would become (as film historian Ken Wlaschin put it) “as closely identified with Italy as spaghetti and opera” and (as author Shawn Levy writes in his 2017 book Dolce Vita Confidential) “a living vessel for a variety of ideas about Italy, female beauty and the Mediterranean temperament”. She also popularized the “poodle” haircut! For what it’s worth, my favourite Lollobrigida film is the berserk 1968 giallo Death Laid an Egg (aka Plucked). Pictured: Gina Lollobrigida photographed by Sid Avery in Acapulco, Mexico in 1959.

[whiteboi-inferiority]

I asked @cutieecassie what's hooking the punters in at the cinema this time of year, being as she's in showbiz n'all. She said 'Disaster'. I said 'Disaster?' She said 'Dis ass terrin' it all up, Daddy'

So now you know

[justforbooks]

The American No by Rupert Everett

The actor, writer and director mines his own backlog of unmade projects to create an exhilarating collection

Rupert Everett prefaces his suite of short stories with an account of the showbiz ruse that provides the title, a grim little routine whereby American film producers intoxicate a would-be screenwriter into feeling that a deal has been done, only to then forget them entirely. Will Everett’s readers offer up the English equivalent, murmuring “Darling, you were marvellous” before moving swiftly on? Well, the collection certainly delivers what Everett’s fans will be hoping for: quality time in his inimitable company. But it also delivers much more. Sometimes, it is simply the energy and poise of the prose that arrest one’s attention; often, it is Everett’s combination of studied carnality with an outlandish gift for invention. This is a storyteller unafraid to spike his black comedy with sudden and strongly brewed emotion – and vice versa.

In his frequent interjections, Everett is disarmingly frank about these stories’ origins. In 20 years of making pitches to TV and film producers, only one project of his has ever landed. This was his directorial debut, The Happy Prince, a meditation on Oscar Wilde’s fall from grace which got considerably more of Wilde’s rage and sorrow on to the screen than many more respectable versions (elements of the film are reworked in the second of these stories). But that was back in 2018, and these days, Everett’s phone isn’t ringing. A rain swept encounter with a former Soho contact sparks the idea that he could usefully bring some of his rejected ideas into a new kind of life. The result is intriguing, not least because these vivid little adventures aren’t really short stories at all; they are scenes from unmade films, reimagined as prose.

In the course of a career that started at the Glasgow Citizens theatre company and took him via the West End to Hollywood and beyond, Everett has been by turns an actor, a writer and a director. Here, he draws on all those different experiences. Whatever the setting, the dialogue is always sharp and telling. Sometimes the author plays himself; required to transform, he inhabits even the strangest of his fictional alter egos with assurance. The settings are realised with distinctively cinematic flair; they range from the backstreets of Wilde’s Paris to their Aids-era equivalents, from a ruined Anglo-Irish mansion to a heat-becalmed Suez canal. Their genres vary as much as the settings: one piece dishes the dirt on the underbelly of 1980s Hollywood with made-for-TV tastelessness; another documents a failed shipboard romance as the very best kind of costume drama, clear-eyed and memorable. Everett makes especially skilful use of cinema’s easy ability to filter its stories through screens of memory and flashback; only on rereading the collection do you notice that the intensity and colour of the storytelling almost always spring from the fact that everything is being played out in someone’s dreams, or memories or nightmares.

This becomes most explicit in the last story, which drops all pretence of transforming its material into short-form prose and is laid out as an actual film script. This piece, fascinatingly, is made out of just one episode’s worth of material intended for a TV series based on Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Instead of going for the elegant restraint of Harold Pinter’s version (also unproduced), this filleting and re-ordering of the granddaddy of all flashback narratives is lyrical and violent, unafraid of dwelling on Proust’s lust and cruelty as the dying author ransacks his memories for meaning. Episodes from Proust’s own life are woven into those of his novel, and the final sequences especially restore some much-needed sexual explicitness to this darkest of autofictions.

Individually, the stories are exhilarating; together, they add up to an intriguing self-portrait of an artist at work, presenting us with the multiple facets of an undaunted imagination, recut, repolished and ready to shine in the dark.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[sukimas]

breaking bad is a show that all kinds of people get all kinds of things out of in different ways etc etc yeah but i think the slightly under-researched chem knowledge really adds some charm to it sometimes

for example, walt's meth that he's so proud of the purity of, made using quality ingredience and proper chemistry equipment, right. the purity there is 99.1%. and walt's some kind of award winning chemist and all, yadda yadda, contributed to nobel-winning research. anyway.

99.1% purity in a synthesis product is unpublishably bad.

as in journals will not publish you if your final product is 99.1% pure. 99.6% is reagent grade, suitable for mass production and lab work. that is what journals will accept in synthesis- 0.4% impurity.

of course, the meth being blue means it's not pure in the first place, but that's just showbiz. by actively stating the purity quantitatively in the show and being proud of it, it's instantly recognizable that walter white is full of hot air about his capabilities (in a way that does, in fact, come back to bite him in the ass!) and it probably wasn't even intentional.

poetic cinema.

[burtonandtaylor]

The day Hollywood stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton came to Nottingham

It was half a century ago that Nottingham was sprinkled with a bit of showbiz glitter. Andy Smart looks back to a memorable day in history.

Nottingham had seen nothing like it since the days of The Beatles.

The most glamorous couple in showbiz were coming to town and fans of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were desperate to get a glimpse of the Hollywood stars.

Richard and Liz were in Nottingham back in 1968 for the East Midlands premiere of their new film Dr Faustus and the crowd which flocked to the old Moulin Rouge cinema in Milton Street was estimated at more than 1,000.

After the screening, as the couple prepared to leave in their gleaming Rolls-Royce, Burton was presented with a rugby ball and a bottle of ale by five-year-old Richard Oxley.

Then it was the job of the city police to push the crowds back to clear space for the stars’ departure.

In 2003 Richard Oxley, of Marlpool, recalled that proud moment when Richard Burton autographed the rugby ball.

He explained: “I was five at the time and my parents had entered a local competition for children named Richard or Elizabeth to win the chance to meet the stars.

“I was chosen, together with an older girl (Lexie Whittington from Basford) who gave a bouquet of flowers to Liz, and I had to get him to sign a ball to be raffled for charity.

"I vaguely remember a policeman helping me. And I can remember I was paid a guinea. It’s my claim to fame.

“Whenever I see Richard Burton in one of his films on television, I always tell my children that I once met him."

That wasn’t the only time they were seen in Nottingham. There was the occasion when legendary Playhouse director John Neville invited his old thespian chum Richard Burton to do a night of readings with fellow Welsh actor Donald Huston.

In a 2004 interview, actor Laurence Harrington, who was a member of the Playhouse company at the time, recalled: “Richard and Liz Taylor arrived with their entourage. There were about 12 of them; private detectives, secretaries, you name it.

“Here at the Playhouse were two of the biggest stars in the world.

“Liz had to go to the Playhouse offices over the road in Wellington Circus. I shall never forget escorting her from the stage door to the office with the stage manager, a chap called Tony.

“As we walked up the slight hill Liz noticed the stage manager only had a thin shirt on and, slipping her arm out of mine, she took off her coat and wrapped it around his shoulders.

“I will never forget his face or mine, when she turned to me, smiled and said: ‘It’s a bit chilly isn’t it?’ Her violet blue eyes were the most beautiful I have ever gazed into.

“I also remember the way Burton rehearsed meticulously, assiduously trying to knock off a minute here, a few seconds there, when he felt the programme was overlong.”

They stayed at the George Hotel in Hockley and it provided a memorable moment for barmaid Mary Handley, as she told the Post in 2003.

It was a Sunday night when Mary was warned to expect someone special. She remembered taking the message with a pinch of salt.

In the four years she had worked in the George’s Peacock Bar, Mary was used to mixing with the rich and powerful, so one more was not going to shake her.

But then in walked Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. He ordered a vodka for himself and gin and tonic for the wife and for the next 25 minutes the golden couple sat at the bar chatting with Mary about this and that.

“She was beautiful and he was very, very nice. They were fabulous people really and you could tell, just by looking at them, that they were in love,” she said.

“When the Rolls-Royce came to collect them, he just told me to keep the change. It was about £4 which was quite a lot in those days.”

By the time Liz and Richard returned from their appearance at the Playhouse, Mary had finished her stint for the night.

“I know they had room 504, which was the top suite, but I did not see them again. Perhaps they left early in the morning.”

Among the audience for that Playhouse event was the Post’s celebrated theatre critic Emrys Bryson, who recalled: “Those who expected to have Elizabeth Taylor sitting in their midst, glittering in the darkness were wrong.

“For she remained unseen until the last few minutes – until, in floor-length white kaftan and a hairdo piled as high as a guardsman’s bearskin, she came on stage.

“And there, in a gentle Welsh accent, she took part in an excerpt from Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, reading the role of the dead Rosie Probert.

“It was an electric, super-charged evening, sparkling on the star aura of the Burtons – with Richard on the stage and the knowledge that his wife, the most glamorous woman in the world, was around in the wings.

”The show coincided with St David’s Day. Outside in the foyer signed posters bearing the picture of a daffodil were being sold at a pound a time. Proceeds from poster and ticket sales were donated to charity.

Among the celebrity performers taking part were Donald Houston and John Neville.

The audience was treated to a variety of readings ranging from a DH Lawrence description of a snake to a poem about Aberfan written by Mr Burton’s niece.

Emry Byrson wrote: “Burton made that superb voice of his ferret into every crevice of the theatre.”

That same year, 1968, Burton starred alongside Clint Eastwood in the war adventure film Where Eagles Dare. His fee was £1m plus a share of the profits. He appeared in a total of 79 films, was Oscar-nominated seven times, but never won the coveted award.

By contrast, Taylor made 78 movies, winning the best actress Oscar twice (Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf and Butterfield 8).

[alpha-mag-media]

Hocus Pocus is 30! As the film gets a cinema re-release will we get to meet the Sanderson sisters for a third time? | In Trend Today

Hocus Pocus is 30! As the film gets a cinema re-release will we get to meet the Sanderson sisters for a third time? Read Full Text or Full Article on MAG NEWS

[ur-mag]

Fans love it as KSI’s blockbuster boxing fight against Tommy Fury will be shown live in CINEMA with Logan Paul on card | In Trend Today

Fans love it as KSI’s blockbuster boxing fight against Tommy Fury will be shown live in CINEMA with Logan Paul on card Read Full Text or Full Article on MAG NEWS

[ricisidro]

Rest in peace, Queen of Philippine Cinema, Ms. Gloria Romero 🕊️

#GloriaRomero #film #showbiz #movie #entertainment #icon #legend #RIP #filipinaactress #filipina #photooftheday