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victorjbanisfamilyfoundation · 2 months ago

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Abridged version of when Victor J. Banis was indicted for obscenity charges, from his memoir 'Spine Intact, Some Creases' (it hops around from chapter to further along chapter). Seemed relevant right now, especially what he decided to do in the end.

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Curiouser and Curiouser. I kept the appointment as arranged and found that I was to be charged, along with ten others, with Conspiracy to Distribute Obscene Material. I met my fellow conspirators – Milt Luros and his wife, Bea, the owners of Brandon House and a number of other publishing operations; Mel Friedman, of course; Bernie Abramson, who headed their shipping department; Stanley Sohler, Harold Straubing and Paul Wisner, who were editors; Elmer Batters, a free lance photographer; and two other free lance writers besides myself – Sam Merwin and Richard Geis. The others were each of them hit with a variety of charges but I was included only in the first, blanket conspiracy charge, a fact which would ultimately prove significant.

Conspiracy? Didn’t that require some form of communication among the conspirators? I had never met any of these people before, nor communicated with them in any manner. Indeed, until we met at the Federal Building, I had never even heard their names. The only person from the Luros publishing business with whom I had communicated – except for the call the day before from Mel Friedman – was the editor who had written regarding my book, and his only suggestion had been to expand its length. There had been no suggestions, veiled or otherwise, to ‘spice up’ the book in any way, as would later be suggested in court, or to address myself to anyone’s prurient interests. Gloria’s melons were entirely my own. Anyway, that editor wasn’t among my indicted co-conspirators.

It was all a bit Kafka-esque. The more so when, as we were leaving the courtroom, I was met by a man who introduced himself as Donald Schoof, Chief Postal Inspector for the Los Angeles area. I later learned that it was Mister Schoof who had headed the so-called investigation and brought the charges against us. Mister Schoof asked to speak with me alone; apparently the others were all known to him but I was a paperback virgin, so to speak. Or almost, anyway, which I have always thought ought to count in those matters. Mister Schoof muttered (muttered, I swear it, just like a bad gangster movie) that he could make things easier for me if I would care to switch sides and cooperate with the government.

Now, at the time, I had no problems with cooperating with the government. I had always considered myself a good citizen, if not a model one, and had never set out to commit any crime. Up until now my only courtroom experience was in Dayton, Ohio in 1956, when an angry wife named me as co-respondent in a divorce case.

But it did seem to me that if this Mister Schoof’s interest was in making things easier for me, the best time to have approached me might have been before I was charged with a crime of which I was so patently innocent. I have always been a devout coward. And after that debacle in the divorce court I certainly wanted no more legal entanglements. To be honest, had someone taken the trouble to romance me beforehand (candlelight and soft music are givens in this scenario) I would probably in the afterglow of consummation have blabbed everything I knew about Milt Luros – which was of course absolutely nothing. But didn’t they already know that? Looking back, I can see that what I was really guilty of was criminal innocence. I hadn’t a clue. In my defense, I might point out that I had not bought those initial paperbacks from ‘under the counter;’ no plain brown wrappers, no hasty swaps in darkened doorways. I had walked into a store in broad daylight, had taken them directly from the racks on the walls, and forked over my money. How could I have guessed that forking so openly might involve anything illegal?

I scorned Mister Schoof’s advances. Anyway, his approach struck me as a bit too ‘after the fact.’ I was indignant at being so falsely charged, and kiss me where he might, Mister Schoof was not going to have me on his mattress willingly. I thought then – and think still – that if they had done a sufficient investigation to bring all these charges against all these people, they must certainly have known that this was a first time effort from me and that I had never met with – let alone conspired with – any of these people.

Besides, when I went home and reread Gloria, I was convinced that someone from the other camp had only to get around to reading this lovely book to realize at once what a mistake had been made.

As I said before, Milt Luros’ critics dubbed him the ‘King of Pornography.’ Actually he was one of the nicest people I had ever met, a soft spoken New Yorker and a true gentleman in the most old fashioned sense of the word. An artist himself, Milt had set out to print quality art books. In short time he found art books entirely unprofitable – but he was able to make money printing sexually related material – initially for others but eventually for his own companies. The Federal Government did not like the material he printed. It seemed that manhood and melon breasts were corrupting society. And as I said earlier, federal law allowed charges to be brought not only where the material was shipped from or to, but anywhere it was shipped through. In our case the charges had been brought and the trial would be held in Sioux City, Iowa, even though none of the material involved was ever available in Sioux City, Iowa. I can say for a fact that my Gloria would not have been found dead in Sioux City. I myself went with the greatest reluctance. The idea apparently was not so much that the government thought they might get convictions on these charges but that by bringing repeated charges and forcing Luros to defend himself over and over again in small towns and cities around the country (at that time, there were trials pending in two other locations, one in Texas and I have forgotten the other) they could bankrupt him – or convince him to give up the business.

The trials were expensive. Including people like myself and the other writers and freelancers who came to Sioux City made it all the more expensive. Partly for his own protection and partly because it was his nature, Milt picked up the tab for everyone and did so in the grand manner. The ‘best’ hotel in Sioux City was only a Holiday Inn but that was where Milt stayed and that was where we all stayed. We ate in the same restaurants, flew the same flights back and forth when he did – there was no attempt to save pennies by limiting our share of the expenses. It was generous indeed of Milt – and costly. By the time I got to Sioux City I had come to realize that my indictment had really nothing much to do with me or with Gloria or the desire of the U.S. Authorities to see me in prison, though that might well have been the result. The real reason I was there was to help run up the tab.

All of the pulp publishers of the time had their own attorneys however, who performed the same sort of service. In time I came to see that virtually everything these publishers did was done with one eye on the legal arena. As more and more charges were brought and more material defended in courtrooms, the Courts – particularly the U.S. Supreme Court – struggled to find a coherent legal definition for obscenity. The legal stratagems advised by the publishers’ attorneys changed and developed accordingly.

Two of the key elements handed down by the Supreme Court during this time were that (in order to be considered obscene) the material must, ‘taken as a whole, appeal to the prurient interest of the reader,’ and that it must be ‘utterly without redeeming social value.’ By the mid-sixties it was common for paperback novels to include on their covers or front page blurbs quoting various authorities or ‘experts’ on sexual behavior. So my Stranger at the Door from Greenleaf in 1967 quoted at length Alex Comfort’s book, Sex in Society (1963): ‘Forms of behavior have to be considered in the light of their unconscious origin, in the light of what is customary or tolerated in a given culture, and in the light of the part they play in the individual’s mental economy – of who does what and when and where. It is disproportionate, if we are interested in the social effects, to lay much emphasis on the kind of physical variation or deviation in behavior…’ The actual quote was considerably longer and much in the same vein. I’m not sure that it had any particular relevance to the novel that followed, but it could be seen to supply redeeming social value.

In the late sixties, when ‘case history’ types of non-fiction began to proliferate, these books invariably included an authoritative forward or introduction written by some ‘expert’ – nearly always a Ph.D., though the degree often had nothing at all to do with this field of interest.

In the seventies, books began to appear with out-and-out hardcore photographs. The text that accompanied these action photos addressed psychological and (sometimes peripheral) medical issues and was deliberately written in a dry, scholarly style. It was thought that it would be difficult, hopefully impossible, for a jury considering the work ‘as a whole’ to find this text obscene, whatever they might think of the photographs.

At the time of Gloria, however, and the Sioux City trial, much of that strategy was still in the future. The Affairs of Gloria did have some rather crude drawings, but the sexual element was only vaguely suggested and the people in them were clothed, if sometimes a bit scantily.

Watching these two pros at work was fascinating. And, at least to start, I wasn’t too worried. At this time I still believed that somewhere along the way, someone would look at Gloria and realize a mistake had been made.

And I was a celebrity, if only of a minor sort. Flashbulbs flashed and reporters barked when we arrived at airports, and we made the New York Times (though not the front page). For the record, they had no shortage of words with which to describe us. In Sioux City we were shunned in the manner that every queen comes to recognize and in a perverse way enjoy. We were lepers, but lepers who were the focus of everyone’s attention.

Notwithstanding the interesting companions or circumstances, however, there were ten years in Federal prison hanging over my head. I was young, blond, not unattractive and a bit effeminate. I thought it safe to suppose that, should prison be the outcome, those would not be the cheeriest of years for me.

And that possibility loomed larger as the weeks passed in the courtroom in Sioux City. Besides books the charges involved a handful of nudist magazines as well. Not the hardcore action pics that you can buy in gift shops today, nor even the bare beavers of Hustler or Penthouse. These were more the Sunshine & Health sort of thing – people in the buff playing volley ball, with the occasional limp appendage bouncing about. I suppose someone might have been sexually aroused by the pictures – but then I know people who get turned on looking at pictures of trolleys.

By the by, none of these magazines were sold in Sioux City. Indeed, there was only one shop that sold Playboy, under the counter. You had to ask for it and it came in the proverbial plain brown wrapper. So it was worrisome to watch jurors, charged with determining if this material was obscene, pass magazines from one to another without a glance at them, holding them gingerly by their fingertips as it fearing contamination. Had they even read Gloria, I wondered? I doubted it. More to the point, the indictment named me in a conspiracy charge with all the other defendants so that, though I had nothing at all to do with these magazines – heck, I hadn’t even seen some of them, and never got to – the finding that they were obscene could send me to prison.

I got more nervous still when government witnesses, former employees of the Luroses, testified under oath about my connections with the other defendants – meetings I allegedly attended, phone calls, letters – all fictitious. I could only imagine what threats or promises the Federal prosecutors must have made to get this sort of perjured testimony from frightened witnesses. What if I had accepted Mister Schoof’s invitation to testify against Luros? I knew nothing at all about Luros or his operations and so there was nothing in truth I could have said. But would Schoof and the prosecutors have found a way to force me to say what they wanted said, truth or not? I like to think not but clearly they had accomplished just that feat with other witnesses.

I was soon enough aware that they were not shy about intimidation. The trial hadn’t even begun before my first class mail began to arrive opened (yes, Virginia, it is illegal). Manuscripts were routinely left at my doorstep atop their envelopes, in case I had any doubts that they were being perused.

Was I paranoid or was my Sioux City motel room really bugged? An employee of the motel whispered to me that it was. I don’t know why he would have made up such a story. And Stanley Fleishman, without saying so directly, gave me to understand that it was safest to make that assumption.

So much for justice and the American way. The foreplay was over. The federal government and Mister Schoof had me on the bed and they weren’t going to let me up until they had their vile ways with me. The trial went on. And on. It became less interesting to sit and listen to testimony I knew to be false. At the beginning we had buoyed ourselves with the hope that the Judge would quickly dismiss the case or that the prosecution’s case would prove brief and we would soon be done with it. The indictments had come down in March of 1965. The trial began in October. We hoped to be home by Halloween. Then Thanksgiving. Christmas loomed.

At last in late December the government rested its case. Our side rested its case without presenting one. Fleishman and Foreman were convinced that the charges had not been proven but there was more to their strategy than that. Experience had shown that these cases often went to the appeals courts. That was actually better for the publisher – the results of a local district trial had little impact on the actions of other courts but a ruling by the appeals court was binding on all Federal courts within that district unless overturned by the Supreme Court – in other words, a ruling at the appellate level could work to Luros’ benefit in other courtrooms and to the benefit of other publishers as well.

In a sense, then, offering no defense was virtually asking for a move to the appellate court – and at the same time giving the government no goofs in the defense case to seize upon and use to argue against an appeal.

All well and good, of course. The strategy was a sound one. But I had been abused and misused for four months; and it left us heading home for a Christmas recess with the outcome still unresolved. Not a very merry Christmas present.

Needless to say we did finally get to the ground intact, if not unsoiled. I vowed that I would never again set foot in an airplane. We arrived at the Federal Courthouse only a few minutes late – and within a few minutes more the judge had dismissed the conspiracy count of the indictment. Which meant effectively that he had dismissed me. Acquitted, I was free to go – to spend several days returning back to Los Angeles by bus or train, or renege on my vow and hop a plane.

Still I was free. My co-defendants proved not so lucky. They were convicted by the Sioux City jury, those uptight – sorry, I meant upright – men and women who had declined even to look at the evidence presented to them. In time those convictions were overturned on appeal, as our attorneys had foreseen, but my co-defendants would spend the intervening time wondering if they were on their way to prison and live out their lives with the stigma of a federal conviction. Was Justice served, I asked?

‘Justice was served,’ Dick Geis answered me with understandable bitterness. ‘She was served her head on a platter.’

For me, the bottom line was that my innocence was gone forever. I had been screwed in no uncertain terms. And we all know what that means for your virginity. I felt sore and violated. I came home from Sioux City with a burning resentment for the callous disregard that the government had displayed for what I considered some pretty fundamental rights I thought guaranteed by our constitution. There’s a reason that the founding fathers put freedom of speech right up there at the beginning. Without that, the rest doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, does it?

And it had all been for naught, as I saw it. It can be a mistake attempting to explain the thought processes of others, but one would have to suppose that in part, at least, the governmental individuals involved in indicting me must have assumed that they could discourage me from any further activity in the paperback business. Ironically, the result was exactly the opposite.

Under other circumstances, I’m not sure that I would have had much interest in pursuing a paperback writing career; Gloria had been fun but a whim, really. Certainly I had no interest in a career writing of faux lesbians.

I was still hurting, however, and I felt practically compelled to write at least one or two more books, to show the Federales (and myself) that I had not been intimidated. Well, if I am going to be entirely honest, I have to mention that I quickly discovered that the books were easy to do, for me at any rate. And they paid money.

The only problem was, I had decided I wanted to write gay books, and if lesbians incited government censors to action, writing about gay males doing the deed was like waving red panties in front of a horny bull. The postal authorities and the courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, had already proclaimed that sort of dalliance a no-no. Two men holding hands was enough to render a book obscene, as these folks saw it. Holding anything else was blasphemy, at the very least.

I continued to write for Brandon House Books, heterosexual and lesbian-bisexual novels; none, I’m sure, of any real merit. Not even out of respect for our common travail, however, would Milt Luros venture into homosexual waters, nor was I able to generate any interest among the other paperback publishers of the day. By now they all knew who I was. Paperback publishing in those days was a small town and I had paid my dues by taking my lumps along with Luros and company. Everyone was eager to see something from me in the heterosexual or lesbian vein, but even the bravest of them were convinced gay books would be like dropping their pants with little hope of satisfaction.

Well, as everyone knows, when a guy gets really hot for something he isn’t usually much inclined to be discouraged. I remained stubbornly convinced that there was a large and largely untapped market for gay books. The Stonewall uprising wouldn’t happen until 1969, but already by 1965 gays were coming out of their closets.

In 1965 I wrote my first gay novel, The Why Not. The Why Not of the title was a bar my friends and I frequented, actually called The Castaways but dubbed The Why Not by my secretary, Lady Agatha, because the usual conversation on a weekend was, ‘Are you coming to the bar tonight?’, ‘Why not?’ The book was essentially a collection of vignettes describing my experiences with the bar and its habitués.

#victor j. banis #queer history #queer #lgbtqia+#gay pulp #politics #victor j banis

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are-they-z · 1 year ago

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Supporters of Creative Community For Peace Open Letter (Support of Israel) - Part 2/2

Bryan Terry, Head of Development, Vice TV

Melanie Greene, VP, Finance, Above Average Productions

Antony Gordon, Managing Director, Adeptus Partners/CEO, AG Productions

Jennifer Duberstein, Head of Sports Business Affairs, CAA Sports

Diane Mayer, CEO/Founder, Crown Jules Entertainment

Dan Carrillo Levy, Writer/Director, Moxie 88

Logan Binstock, Agent, CAA

Gregg Rossen, Screenwriter

Stephany Hurkos, Personal Manager, Stephany Hurkos Management

Jessica Pollack, Talent Strategy Executive, UTA

Marla Levine, Attorney/Producer/Consultant

Andrew Lear, Partner/Agent, UTA

Ben Bruskin, TV Traffic Coordinator, Allen Media Group

Steve Bornfeld, Writer/Editor, Freelance

Linda Lichter, Attorney, Founding Partner, Lichter, Grossman, Nichols, Adler Feldman and Clark, Inc.

Scott Stone, President, Stone & Company Entertainment

Mark Canton, CEO & Producer, Canton Entertainment

Robert Kamen, Writer

Itay Reiss, Manager/Producer, Artists First

Stephanie Davis, Literary Manager, Wetdog Entertainment

Sean Canino, President of Television, McFarlane Films LLC

Barry Schkolnick, Writer/Producer, Schoolboy Productions, Inc

Richard Rionda Del Castro, CEO, Hannibal Media

Lawrence Scot Deutchman, Producer, Great Escape Entertainment, LLC

Jeff Hynick, Partner, Jackoway Austen Tyerman Wertheimer Mandelbaum Morris Bernstein Trattner & Klein

John Ondrasik, Singer-Songwriter, Five for Fighting

Erik Arnold, Writer/Linguist

Sean Elliott, Partner/Office-Head/Talent Manager, Authentic Talent & Literary Management

Sadaf Muncy, SVP, Development and Production, HappyNest Entertainment

Dean Cain, Filmmaker

Brandi George, CEO, Presse Public Relations

Roger Friedman, Owner, www.showbiz411.com

Marc Klein, Screenwriter, Birdy Num Num Inc

Eytan Keller, President, Keller Productions, Inc

Adam Schweitzer, Talent Agent, CAA

James Stoteraux, Writer/Showrunner

David Hunt, Owner, FourBoys Entertainment

Chad Fiveash, Writer/Showrunner

Adam Rosen, Partner, Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks, P.C.

Kevin Misher, Principal, Misher Films

Nathaniel Bear, Filmmaker, Nat Bear Media/4M Reviews

Deborah Gilels, Publicist, LAMedia Consultants

Lionel Chetwynd, Writer/Director/Producer

Dick Atkins, Producer, A-Films, LLC

Wayne Fitterman, Agent, WME

Gloria Carlin, Actor

Ellen H. Schwartz, Film Producer

Larry Webman, Agent, Wasserman

Emily Gerson Saines, Founding Manager/Producer, Brookside Artist Management

Michael Skloff, Composer, MSM

Joshua Feldman, Writer

Cory Richman, Manager, Liebman Entertainment

Sharon Paz, Senior Talent Agent, A3 Artists Agency

Jonathan Rubenstein, Producer, Crystal City Entertainment

Leah Yerushalaim, Agent, CAA

Brian Liebman, Manager, Liebman Entertainment

David Bickel, Writer/Producer

Samantha Nisenboim, Producer

Ruchel Freibrun, Marketing Specialist

David Caspi, Journalist, Golden Globes

Tommy Finkelstein, Head of Business Affairs, Independent Artist Group

Peter Biegen, Writer

Patrick J. Nicolas, Actor

Constantin Werner, Writer/Director/Producer, Rusalka Film

Jordan Silverberg, Head Of Music, Wild Card Creative Group

Susie Arons, President, Strategic Communications, 42West

Ben Winston, Partner, Fulwell 73

Jeff Refold, COO & CFO, Ryan Seacrest Productions

Robert Lantos, Producer, Serendipity Point Films

Beth Schwartz, Showrunner

Gideon Yago, Writer

Mel Nieves, Actor/Playwright/Screenwriter/Arts Educator

Phyllis Strong, Writer

Beverly D’Angelo, Actor

Ron Mix, Retired Professional Football Player

Shyla La’Sha, Actor

Ellen Lafair, President, Big Top Marketing and Promotions, Inc.

Robert Siegel, Writer/Showrunner

Mitchell Gossett, Talent Manager, Industry Entertainment

John Fogelman, CEO, FactoryMade Ventures

Tanisha Harper, Actress, Mariko Entertainment

Jonathan Golfman, Co-President Film, MRC

Allen Kates, Ghostwriter/Author, Holbrook Street Press

Hannah Li-Paz, Assistant, Echo Lake Management

Harris Doran, Writer/Director/Producer

Lawrence Kopeikin, Entertainment Lawyer, Kopeikin Law PC

Cindi Berger, Chairman, R&CPMK

Patricia Marin, Producer, Marin Group Productions

Andrew Carlberg, Producer

Yariv Milchan, Chairman and CEO, New Regency

Ashley Adler, Voice Actor

Ben goldmanRobert Zaccano, Executive Producer, Little Theatre of Mechanicsburg

Ali Axelrad, Actor

Trevor Raine Bush, Actor

Nancy Belle Novello-Hahn, Owner/Founder iRead2Know Radio Network iHeartRadio, iHeartRadio

Ann Kline, Music Supervisor

Jennifer Kim, Sr Manager, The Walt Disney Company

E Randolph Kielich, Visual & Photographic Artist, Broken Light Inc.

Dawn Solér, President, Working Music Entertainment LLC

William Todd Levinson, Actor, Independent

Jessica Kaminsky, Writer/Producer

Gary Mantoosh, Partner, The Initiative Group

Oliver Ewy, Actor

Beth Milstein, Writer

Eric Slee, Data Analyst, Writers Guild of America West

Julia McArthur, Actor

Matt Galsor, Partner, Greenberg Glusker

Jessica Sharzer, Screenwriter

Eileen O’Farrell, Owner/Manager, Eileen O’Farrell Personal Management

Tair Biton, Producer, One Night Only

Scott Rosenbaum, Showrunner/Writer

Sam Kott, Producer

Howard Brande, President & Executive Producer, Brain Bucket Productions, LLC

Hodayah Miller, Executive Assistant, HBO

Jan Kovac, Film Editor

Emma Andrus, Filmmaker

Amy Elmer, Events, CAA

Danielle Nebel, Actress

Dorit Rochelle, Publicist

Kevin Gimble, Agent

Lars Sylvest, Producer

Lawrence Bender, Producer, Lawrence Bender Productions

Naomi Bulochnikov-Paul, EVP, Publicity & Head of Communications, Disney Entertainment

Ashley Kline Shapiro, Vice President, Publicity, ABC Entertainment

Liza Chasin, Producer, 3dot Productions

Michael Diamond, Partner/Talent Agent, MGMT ENTERTAINMENT

Sheri Rosenberg Kelton, CEO/Literary and Talent Manager, SRK Entertainment

Jay Weisleder, Film & TV Producer, Fuego Films

Kristin Konig, Talent Manager, MGMT. Entertainment

Diana Garelik, Manager, Original Content Post Production, IMAX

Theodore Bressman, Writer

Andy Hirsch, Actor

Leonard Fisher, Music Engineer, L. F. Productions

Claire Kennedy, Writer, Baby Banana Productions

Gary Shlifer, Director/DP

Paul Farberman, President, Paul Farberman Entertainment

Robert Golenberg, Partner, Silver Lining Entertainment Productions

Melanie Elman, Talent Agent, Gersh

Maggie Lane, Writer/Producer, The Maggie Lane Company

Lindsay Arends, Actress

Scott Weinger, Writer/Actor

Sarah Abrams, Artist

Kia Kamran, Attorney, Kia Kamran P.C.

Esther Hornstein, Producer

Candi Zell, Actor

Joshua Jolcover, Editor, Dunphy Films, Inc.

Marc Gerber, Retired Film Marketing Executive/Creative Advertising Producer

Isabelle Marcus, CEO

Sally Ware, Manager, Industry Entertainment

Stu Levy, Founder and CEO, TOKYOPOP

Josh Radnor, Actor/Writer/Director

Steven Warner, Actor/Writer/Director, Trove Films

Larry Webster, President, Media Magik Entertainment

Courtney Kivowitz, Owner/Partner, MGMT. Entertainment

Aron Baumel, Partner, Goodman, Genow, Schenkman, Smelkinson & Christopher, LLP

Stephen Sewell, Screenwriter, ISM Films

Roger Kumble, Writer/Director

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Ben Goldman, A&R, ONErpm

Ori Marmur, VP, Original Studio Film, Netflix

Jay Levy, Writer/Producer, Jay Levy Entertainment

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Marty Adelstein, CEO, Tomorrow Studio

Zosia Mamet, Actor

Mor Muriel Naim, Director/Writer

Anna Green, Promoter, Exceptional Artists

Shira Gross, Actor

Tara August, President, A Type, Inc.

Henry Selick, Animation Director, Twitching Image Inc.

Adam Kanter, Partner, Head of Motion Picture Literary, A3 Artists Agency

Stacey Sher, Film and Television Producer, Shiny Penny Productions

Russell Schwartz, Head of Business Affairs, Starz

Peter Levinsohn, Chairman, Global Distribution, NBCUniversal Studio Group

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Limor Gott Ronen, Executive Producer, Gott Films

Maor Azran, Producer, MA Productions

Andy Given, EVP Production Administration, Sony

Howard Benson, Producer, Judge & Jury Records

Sheryl Feuerstein, Agency Owner, EastWest Media

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Constance Schwartz-Morini, Managing Partner/Co-Founder, SMAC Entertainment

Jonathan Prince, President, PhilmCo Media

Zoey Grayce, Actress

Jennifer Dietz, Partner/Founder, Animal Law Attorneys, PA

Marnie Briskin, Talent Manager, Circle of Confusion

Evan Silver, Director, Reformschool.tv

David Kendall, Writer/Director

Alicia Karlin, VP, Global Touring, AEG Presents

Romeo Santiago, Location Scout & Manager, Romeo Santiago & Co

Joe Montifiore, President, Rafterman Media

Marc Brownstein, Bass Player/Co-Founder, The Disco Biscuits/HeadCount

John Jacobs, Producer, Smart Entertainment

Peter Bochner, Editor

Paul Pflug, Managing Partner, PCG

Kevin Farley, Artist

Nacho Arenas, Founder, Planeo Films

Marty Callner, Director, Cream Cheese Films

Alex Berechet, Location Scout

Odeya Rush, Actress

Pierce O’Donnell, Partner, Greenberg Glusker LLP

Jeffrey Moon, Video Editor

Andi Howard, Artist Manager/Record Company Executive, Andi Howard Entertainment/Peak Records

Bob Ringe, CEO, Anime Entertainment LLC

Dan Signer, Writer/Producer

Viviane Telio, Film Agent, Verve

Adva Reichman, Writer/Director

Wayne Tighe, Chairman and CEO, The Tighe Group Entertainment, LLC

Nami Melumad, Composer

Richard Wolf, Producer/Composer, The Producers Lab, Inc.

Roni Weissman, Filmmaker

Josh Schaer, Writer/Producer

Mendel Goldman, Musical Artist, Born Entertainment

Marie Minnich, Website Developer, Lyrics On Demand

David Margolis, Photographer

David Rowell, Associate Professor, Arts and Entertainment Management, Dean College

Martin Masadao, Production Designer

Mary Jo Mennella, CEO, Music Asset Management, Inc.

Lisa Rockoff, Freelance Make-Up Artist

David Lasky, Producer, David Jay Lasky Productions

Lynn Silver, Actress/Writer

Annah Boyer, Actor

Dana Kaminski, Actor, Voiceover

Billy Schwartz, Film Acquisitions/Sales, Quiver Distribution

Karen Maine, Writer/Director

Julie Hermelin, Managing Partner, Gutsy Media

Julie Carson, Retired Sales Manager, Warner Bros

Camila Seta, Executive, CAA

John Kreidman, Producer

Gary Pearl, Television and Film Producer, Aquarius Content

Sharon Hart-Green, Writer

Michael Burwick, President, Strategic Sports, Media & Entertainment LLC

Charlotte Lichtman, Agent, CAA

Ethan Landzberg, Independent Producer

Louis Allen Epstein, Agent/Entertainer/Head Writer, Best Entertainers/AdamsDavy Productions

Cheryl Watson, Retired Theatre Teacher/Acting Coach

Bonnie Greenberg, Music Supervisor/Professor, Ocean Cities Entertainment/NYU

Douglas Denning, Screenwriter

Iddo Goldberg, Actor

Charles Horn, Writer

Louise O’Brien-Moran, VP Production & Deputy Film Commissioner, Manitoba Film & Music

Tory Howard, Vice President/Partner, Atlas Artists

Matt Sherman, Talent Manager, Matt Sherman Management

Douglas Edley, Talent Agent, UTA

Jessica Kantor, Agent, UTA

Frederic Richter, Archival Producer/Consultant

Emily Brundige, Animation Writer/Showrunner

Scott Halle, President, Gramercy Park Entertainment

Jess Parker, Actor

Brett Gursky, Writer/Director/Producer, Magic Hour

Danielle Solzman, Film Critic, Solzy at the Movies

Barry Weiss, Academy Member

Ann Cherkis, Writer/Producer

Christopher Lussier, Producer, Hollywood Motion Pictures

Anastasia Pozhidaeva, Screenwriter

Gary Kaplan, Singer/Performance Artist

James Cullen Bressack, Director/Producer, Sandaled Kid Productions

Natalie Shampanier, Screenwriter

Inon Shampanier, Writer/Director

Mark Owens, CEO, Rogers & Cowan/PMK

Dani O, Producer

Kevin Walsh, Producer, The Walsh Company

Allan Mandelbaum, Producer, Imagine

Shelly Amor, Artist

Brian Schneiderman, Writer

Heidi Peaster, Author

Jarrett Furst, Producer

Holly Spiegel, Engagement Manager, Motion Picture Television Fund

Cheynne Moye, Streamer/Content Creator/Activists, Twitch

Howard Stein, Film Professional

Suzanne Scara, Writer, Active Ingredients

Vincent Brown, Writer, Completely Plausible Prod.

Susan Gurman, Theatrical Agent, Gurman Agency LLC

Michelle De Vries, Music Supervisor, Extra Mile Music

Mary Beth Leidman, Host/Producer

Linda Kessler, Artist

Sarajane Robinson, Actor

Risa Miller, Novelist

Danny Cohen, President, Access Entertainment

Maksim Kunin, President, Banyan Communications

Dagmar Jaeger, Visual Artist

Marc Simonsson, Film and TV Agent, SoloSon Media Limited

Paul Richman, Director, PR Films

David Thurman, Musician, Aweberry Records

Marnie Salsky, Documentarian

Deborah Hall, Writer

Fredric London, Actor

Winfried Hammacher, Producer, WMG Films

Jack Ferdman, Film Critic/Podcaster, Rewatching Oscar Podcast

Anne Smith, Hairdresser/Makeup Artist

Kenneth Slotnick, CEO, AGI Entertainment Media & Management, LLC

Jacob Marko, Television Producer/Artist

Miriam Spritzer, Entertainment Journalist, Golden Globes

Marian Wolf, Chief of Staff and SVP US Publishing, BMG

Brian Stern, Partner, AGI Entertainment Media & Management

Edward Fletcher, Musician

Thomas Arslan, Director

Steve Kline, President/COO, Better Noise Entertainment

FTV Teubner, Artist

Steven Cohen, Writer

Robert Harris, Founding Partner, Lazarus & Harris LLP

Victoria Selman, Author

Gregor Tholl, Author/Journalist

Na’ama Keha, Filmmaker

Max Nagler, Agent, Verve Talent & Literary Agency

Thomas Lynch, Retired Actor

Ben Solenberger, Actor

Marilee Albert, Producer/Author, Amicus Pictures

Richard Wright, Podcaster Host/Producer, TPFP

Matt Torres, Artist

Kadia Saraf, Actor and Writer

Terry Serpico, Actor/Writer

Leslie Litt, Sr. Casting Executive, Amazon MGM Studios

Betty Pillk, Actor

Victoria Gordon, Actress/Singer/Writer

Robin Blick, Musician

Andrew Atkinson, Actor/Musician, Chapel Music Company

Ross Warner, Writer, Operation Thunderball

Udo Kulvinder Jolly, Actor/Playwright

Vicky Asher, Singer

David Livingston, Director

Andreas Galk, Author

David Stone, Artist Manager, PRF Management

Jim Smith, Writer, 2thirteen22 Productions

Benjamin Shekelbergstein, Producer/Director, New World Studios, Inc.

Mark Landesman, Business Manager/CEO, ML Management Partners

Mandore Oviedo, Writer/Producer, Fenna Productions

Diana Hoffman, President, Music With Confidence

Meirav Zur, Actor/Producer

Cheryl Bloch, Partner, Backyard Pix

Homer Hickam, Writer/Author, H3 Author

Susan Cartsonis, Partner, Resonate Entertainment

Alyssa Rosenheck, Author, Speaker & Photographer

Dina Smith, Production

David Kanter, Manager/Producer/Partner, Anonymous Content

Erika Rosenheim, Talent Manager

Jeff Greenberg, Senior VP, Gersh

Suzanne Farwell, Producer

Clément Bauer, Producer, Resonate Entertainment

Tim McKinney, Actor/Director/Producer, Cubed Five Productions

Kaci Christian, Retired TV News Anchor & Investigative Reporter

Aaron Sandler, Producer, Lot 2160

Sharlene Martin, President, Martin Literary Management

Lisa Moran, Production, The Alan Parker Film Company

Susan Sofayov, Author

David Rose, Partner, Pryor Cashman LLP

Jonathan Sturm, Director, HR, MLB Network

Debbie Peiser, Director/Writer

Oriana LaRusso, Social Media Influencer

Chris Collins, Producer, Purposeful Pictures

Michael Chait, Director, TMU Pictures, LLC

Sandy Sabean, CEO, Merity, LLC

David Eisman, Partner, Head of Entertainment Group, Skadden

Emily Greenberg Hogan, 1st Assistant Director

Ross Kohn, Producer

Catherine Rich, Executive Producer

Maxwell Weberman, L&OD, Endeavor

Carole Davis, Actor

Lindsay Fabes, Actor/Director/Singer

Geoffrey Cantor, Actor

Duff Berschback, Lawyer, Concord Music Publishing

Karynne Tencer, PR Exec, Tencer & Associates

Sloan Roberts, Actor

Iris Bahr, Actor/Author

Robert Glynn, Writer/Director/Editor/Camera Operator

David Singer, Co-Chair, Content, Media & Entertainment, Jenner & Block LLP

Hal Burg, CEO, Brandview

Adam Rodman, Writer

Micah D. Sjerven, Freelance Filmmaker

Rafael Marmor, Founder, Delirio Films

Eric Kranzler, Manager/Producer, Entertainment 360

Carly Sadolf, Actress/Producer

Beth Delany, Writer

Jim Heath, Teacher/Writer/Actor

Scott Ratner, COO, OBB Media

Kyria Collins, Singer-Songwriter

Maxim Rowlands, Pianist

Chris Dawson, Visual Effects Artist

Allison Estrin, Casting Director, Allison Estrin Casting

Suzi Steiger, Freelance Art Dealer/Curator/Writer

D.J. Gugenheim, President/Partner, Incognegro Productions

Samuel Cohen, Actor

Arthur Spector, Head of Film & TV, Epic

Michael Feldman, Actor

Dalia Ganz, SVP Digital Marketing, Warner Records

Marc Stone, Filmmaker, Banjo Films

Jen Lanter, Director, SHTARKcontrast

Nathan Kaye, Actor/Musician/Music Producer/Composer, New Realms Films, Australia

Max Perlman, Actor

Jordan Serlin, Writer/Agent/Inventor, Warner Bros. Records/ICM/Pacific Swan

Toby Emmerich, Producer, Fireside Films

Peter Vogel, Producer, Blank Slate Pictures

Rebecca Shapiro, Writer/Director, Not Even the Chair Productions

Phylis Rossi, Actor

Eric Eskenazi, Founder, Brooklyn Digital Media, Inc.

Narayan & Janet Baltzo, Musicians/Songwriters, Love Bus Music Unlimited

Natalie Cassoni, Curator, Artist, Cassoni Design Gallery

Michelle Satter, Founding Senior Director, Sundance Institute

Kiersten Lipkin, Choreographer/Dance Educator

Larry Kunofsky, Writer

Michael Glouberman, Writer/Producer, Global Robot

David C. Tam, Actor/Writer/Producer, Telesis Design and Development

Justin Hires, Actor, Hire Level Productions

Saul Blinkoff, Executive Producer/Director, Life of Awesome!

Cindy Bond, Founder/CEO, Mission Pictures International

Jacob Abrams, Executive Director, Abrams Theatre Project

Iris Helfand, Retired, Theatrical Wardrobe Union 764 NYC

Golan Ramraz, Writer/Producer, EGX Film Factory

Eric Schrier, President, Disney Television Studios

Scott Pollack, President, A to Z Media

Matthew Tishler, Songwriter/Producer

William Schmidt, Writer/Producer, Edelson Productiobs

Bruce Cohen, Producer, Bold Choices Productions

Roslyn Cohn, Actress

Greg Goetzman, CEO, Goetzman Group

Alex Astrachan, Director of Development, Permut Presentations

David Permut, President, Permut Presentations

Jill Littman, Partner, Impression Entertainment

Ari Luxenberg, Senior Vice President, Business Affairs, Paramount Television Studios

Joshua Rothstein, CEO/Founder, Ice Cream For Dinner

Kevin Lin, Co-Founder, Twitch

Stacy Harris, Publisher/Executive Editor, Stacy’s Music Row Report

Mark Rogers, Musician, abovewaters indy

Nizar Aghri, Writer

Timotius Samanuli, Director, EMOS Global Digital

Virtic Emil Brown, Filmmaker, Artist Studio Prods.

Tim Clemente, Writer/Producer, XG Productions

Jay Karas, Director

Laurence Miller, Producer, Nimax Theatres

Birgit Grebenstein, Sound Technician

Mitchell James Kaplan, Author

Sheila Richey, TV/Film Producer, George Richey Family Music

Gero Worstbrock, Head of Legal & Business Affairs, Constantin Film

Vered Danovitch, Actor, LAV

Richard Motzkin, EVP & Managing Executive, Global Soccer, Wasserman

Matt Greenberg, Managing Partner, Greenberg Chopurian-Valencia & Associates, LLP

Neil Silvert, President and Owner, Your Grey Matters Podcast

John Benjamin David Tatum, Actor/Producer/Director

Matthew Mishory, Director

Iyar Hartogs, Influencer Manager

Dan Bleiwas, Former Major League Baseball Scout

Lisa Cohen, President, Associated Booking Corp.

Sabrina Nudeliman Wagon, CEO, ELO Studios

Peter Tordai, Chief Creative Officer, White Dog

Al Rain, Songwriter/Producer

Tahj Mowry, Actor

Val Stulman, Writer/Actor/Educator

Jonathan Kier, Co-Founder, Upgrade Productions

Gary Gilbert, Producer, Gilbert Films

Jennifer Joel, Co-Head, CAA Books, CAA

Larry Klein, Record Producer/Musician, Strange Cargo Inc

Alan Zweibel, TV Writer/Screenwriter/Playwright/Author

Patrick Schabus, Publishing Director, The Friendly Facts

Seth Faber, SVP Artist & Label Strategy, Stem Distribution

Sylvanna Seydel, Actress/Costumer, Made With Mischief

Yehuda Siegal, Actor

Betty Jo Butler, Talent Agent and Producer, Resilient Films Studios

Daniel Finkelman, Producer/Director, Danielfinkelmanfilms.com

Michael Drebert, Creative Director, Resilient Films Studios

Joseph Browns, Film Set Designer

Zach Calig, Writer/Producer

Greg Hoffman, Actor

Hallie Brookman, Agent, UTA

Victoria Cook, Partner, Frankfurt Kurnit

Ed Buller, Composer/Producer/Musician, who’ll ever have me

Freddie Green, Writer/Director

Andrea Jolly, Actor

Simon Halfon, Producer, Nemperor Ltd

Steve Luna, Actor/Filmmaker

Ricky Kirshner, Producer, Kirshner Events

Jacob Schiff, Agent, CAA

Gerald Petievich, Writer, Charles Carr Productions Inc

Allegra Israel, Games Producer

Allyson Taylor, Actress, Aqua Talent

Don Swayze, Actor

Josh Roehl, Singer/Songwriter

Patricia Randell, Actor

Bill McCarty, Comedian/Actor

Judy Friedman, General Counsel, PhilmCo Media

Dmitry Borshch, Artist

Michal Shany, Entertainment Attorney

David Blackman, EVP, Head of Film &TV Development and Production, Universal Music Group

Declan Joyce, Actor/Writer/Producer, Irish Magic Inc.

Kellie Adan, Spiritual Director/Writer

Michele Robins, Artist

Michael Black, Singer/Songwriter/Artist

Alan Bradley, Author/Songwriter

Richard Klagsbrun, Writer/Composer

Michael Porter, Director, Netflix

Stanley Herman, Actor/Writer/Music Publisher, Jordan/Herman/Holmes

Jon Keidan, Trustee, George Gershwin Godowsky Trust

Adam Gershwin, Manager, Marc George Gershwin LLC

LJ Strunsky, Managing Director, The Ira Gershwin Music Estate

Nataliya Kirakozova, Film Director, Founder, Dva Kapitana

Misha Aranyshev, Editor, Dva Kapitana

Dan Liebman, Actor

Ross Buckley, Senior Business Development Manager, Prime Video

Brett Rosen, Motion Picture Agent, Endeavor

Beth Suckiel, Artist, East Linden Avenue

Iris Joon, Artist, Blair Records & Publishing

Marshall Blair-Cohn, Musician/Composer/CEO, Blair Records & Publishing

Peter Samuelson, CEO, PhilmCo Media LLC

Gerry Tamber, Lead Singer/Mandolin, The Shade Tree Pickers Bluegrass Band

Seth Oster, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, The Wonderful Company

Michael Pasternak, Actor, Founder, The Amazing Bottle Dancers

David Kantrowitz, Musician

Sam Schifrien, Founder/Content Development & Production, 93 Cedar

Cathryn Wadden, Costumer

Jan Kunesh, Exec Director, Production Finance, 20th Television

Robert Avrech, Screenwriter

Sharon Lieblein, Casting Director, Sharon Lieblein Casting

Orly Sitowitz, Casting Director

Bob Kushell, Writer/Producer

Jeffrey Bank, CEO, Alicart Group LLC

Nancy Klopper, Casting Director

Larry Jenkins, Manager, LJ Entertainment

Stacey Pianko, Casting Director, Stacey Pianko Casting

Susan Paley Abramson, Casting Director, Paley Hempe Casting

Lindsay Heiman, Showrunner’s Assistant, Warner Bros.

Wendy Warren, Writer

Tim Blough, Actor

Cathy Sandrich Gelfond, Casting Director, Mackey/Sandrich Casting

Josh Lieberman, Agent, Creative Artists Agency

Mark Silverman, President & COO, Fox Sports

Danielle Cohen, Global Operations and Distribution Executive

Heidi Kozak Haddad, Writer/Actress/Producer

Steven Adelson, Director/Producer, Breakout Pictures Inc

Michelle Hansen Como, Story Developer

Justin Kalifowitz, Founder & Chairman, Downtown Music Holdings

Sherrill Hayes, Writer

Andrew Bergman, CEO, Downtown Music Holdings

Peter Lewit, Managing Partner, Davis Shapiro Lewit & Grabel, LLP

Binta Niambi Brown, Talent Manager, Omalilly Projects

Andrew Howard, Personal Manager, Shelter Entertainment Group

Brenda Kyle, Television Executive

Chris Hartung, Musician

Aidan J. Crowley, Actor/Producer

JoAnne Ruggeri, Arts Administrator

Rona Menashe, Co-CEO and Co-President, Guttman Associate

Lizzie Friedman, Producer/Partner, Priority Pictures

Michael Rauch, Showrunner

Yael Bergman, Producer/Writer, YB Productions

Marissa Nadel, SVP, Integrated Marketing, Paramount

Paul Simpson, Actor

Alan Gary, Actor/Writer, Too Much Fun Productions, Inc.

Eric Gault, Musician

Noah Morris, Writer/Producer/Actor, At Liberty Entertainment Studios

Steve Vitolo, CEO, Scriptation

Noel Ashman, Film Producer/Director

Brian Ash, Writer/Producer

Keith J. Klein, Media Director

William Jeffcock, Director

Jennifer Peralta-Ajemian, Founder/Casting Director, JPA Casting

Ari Roussimoff, Director/Artist

Garry Schyman, Composer, Garry Schyman Productions

Carol Berke, Color Designer, Walt Disney Company

Ari Lubet, Manager, 3 Arts Entertainment

Samantha Korn, Talent Agent, WME

Shari Shankewitz, Partner, WME

Daniel Rak, Agent, WME

Gabriella Shink, Talent Agent, WME

Anna Anna, Agent, WME

Rachel Goldberg, Director

Hilary Michael, Agent, Partner & Co-Head of Literary Packaging, WME

Max Maulitz, Agent, WME

Nicole Rosen, Producer, Ladybug Productions

Agnieszka Kolek, Artist

Jeremy Drysdale, Screenwriter

Samantha Leon, Talent Agent, WME

Alyssa Reuben, Agent, WME

Jeffrey Schnabolk, Senior Manager, IMG Models

Caroline Gold, Writer

Natalie Haverstock, Artist, Miss Ballooniverse Ltd

Mina Kupfermann, Artist

Alan Chebot, Director/Executive Producer, Parallax Productions, Inc.

Wade Brown, Writer

Anna-Sue Greenberg, Producer, Facet4 Media

Sheri Kelton, Manager, SRK Entertainment

Euphrosene Labon, Writer, Wise El Co

Abraham Hoschander, Attorney and Radio Talk Show Host

Nancy Josephson, Partner, WME

Nathan Ross, Film/TV Producer, Lilyrose Productions Inc.

Howard Klein, Partner, 3 Arts Entertainment

Amir Shahkhalili, Agent, WME

Andrea Cayton, Philanthropist

David Boren, Partner, Ritholz Levy Fields LLP

Marc Emert-Hutner, Vice-President, Membership, Pop/Rock, ASCAP

Sara Laffer, Executive, WME

Orna Rachovitsky, Actress/Producer/Filmmaker, Goldart Films

Orestes Matacena, Actor/Producer/Writer/Director, Goldart Films

David Herman, Documentary Director, Double Shot Films

Kos OmIsrael, CEO, Kos Entertainment

Dolores Delaney, Writer

Rhonda Gale, Business Affairs Consultant

Kirk Acevedo, Actor

Talin Chaturantabut, Actor

John Winfield, President and Chairman, InterGroup Corp.

Neil Blair, Founding Partner, The Blair Partnership

Marilyn Lindsay, Production Accountant

Amanda Alley, Creative Executive, Skydance Media

Jim Jackoway, Attorney, Jackoway Austen Tyerman Wertheimer Mandelbaum Morris Bernstein Trattner & Klein

Ben Jacobs, Writer

Steven Keslowitz, Attorney and Author

Aaron Wilson, Writer/Artist

Richard Cannon, Photographer

Nina Mueller, Translator & Actor, COMM-art

Leo Pearlman, Managing Partner, Fulwell 73

Nicholas Frenkel, Partner, 3 Arts Entertainment

Rebecca Wicking, Actor/Singer

Mark Mason, Playwright

Keith Lucas, Filmmaker, LBMC

Joanne Horowitz, CEO, Joanne Horowitz Management

Rod Lurie, Film Writer/Director, Perfection Hunter Productions

Raquel Munoz, Production Executive

Scott Baker, CEO/Founder, RiverArch Ventures LLC

Alexander Ney, Artist

Joel Ney, Independent Creative

Frank Eckhardt, Artist

Noah Munro Lehrman, Musician/Writer

Bar Maman, Artist, Art by Bar

Jamie Conviser, Music Producer, The Walt Disney Company

Roland Ronge, Photographer/Artist

Dvora Englefield, Partner/Head of Music Artist Strategy, WME

Brian Ross, Writer/Producer

David Sacks, Executive Producer

Hannah Lowy, Writer/Director

Bernd Schuller, Artist & Scientist

Will Daws, Creative Director, Plum Pictures

Rinne B. Groff, Playwright/Performer

Lori Silfen, Head of MGM Music, MGM/Amazon Studios

Jacob Elyachar, Chief Content Producer-Writer/Podcast Host

Michelle Jubelirer, Chair & CEO, Capitol Music Group

Andrew Heinze, Playwright, New York City, American Renaissance Theater Company

Adam Butterfield, Producer/Actor

Lisa Mierke, Manager, Mosaic

Bruce Kirschbaum, Writer/Producer

Chaim and Stephanie Glicken, Co-Founders, Digilicious Media LLC

Julia Rymer Brucker, Artist/Art Educator

Lloyd Braun, Producer

Sarah Agor, Actress/Producer

Nathan Ross, Producer

Jonnie Forster, Founder, The Penthouse

Sarah Ulicny, Writer

Holly Hubsher, SVP, Bay Mills Studios

Michael Rubinoff, Theatre Producer

Bruna Papandrea, Founder/Producer, Made Up Stories

Mitchell Akselrad, Writer/Producer

Liran Nathan, Actor

Fred Raskin, Film Editor

Sasha Valenti, Artist

David Friendly, Film/TV Producer, Friendly Films

Allison Eden, Glass Mosaic Artist

Sasha Valenti, Artist

Rachel Morrissey, Artist

Lisa Edelstein, Actress/Artist

Harel Sharon, Editor In Chief, CON-ART magazine

Wyatt Benny, Songwriter/Filmmaker, 327 Films

David Hedges, Writer

Seth Saltzman, Musician/Music Professional

Zoe Manor, Designer/Producer

Emily Leonard, Music Talent Publicity Assistant, The Lede Company

Victor Fresco, Writer/Executive Producer

Adam Shulman, Manager/Producer, Anonymous Content

Sarah Flack, Film Editor

Steve Sackstein, Background Actor

#palestine #palestinian genocide #gaza #apartheid #celebs

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movienized-com · 10 months ago

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History of the World: Part II

History of the World: Part II (Serie 2023) #GaryNguyen #DaveStassen #DoveCameron #PamelaAdlon #JohnnyKnoxville #JoshFadem Mehr auf:

Serie Jahr: 2023- (März) Genre: Comedy / History Hauptrollen: Gary Nguyen, Dave Stassen, Dove Cameron, Pamela Adlon, Johnny Knoxville, Josh Fadem, Evan Shafran, David Slaman, Doug Friedman … Serienbeschreibung: Serienfortsetzung zu „Mel Brooks – Die verrückte Geschichte der Welt“ von 1981. Jede Episode enthält eine Reihe von Skizzen, die uns durch verschiedene Perioden der menschlichen…

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#Dave Stassen #Dove Cameron #Gary Nguyen #Hulu #Johnny Knoxville #Pamela Adlon

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docnad · 11 months ago

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Mel Blanc

Original back cover art to Even More Old Jewish Comedians

Drew Friedman's Old Jewish Comedians https://attemptedbloggery.blogspot.com/2014/03/drew-friedmans-old-jewish-comedians.html #MelBlanc #DrewFriedman

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cinesludge · 4 years ago

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Movie #62 of 2020: Bloodsport

Boxer: “Jackson, you going to go to Hong Kong?”

Jackson: “I love anything full contact. I need a few more scars on my face.”

Boxer: “But I heard you can get killed at that Kumite.”

Jackson: “Only if you fuck up.”

#bloodsport #english #newt arnold #sheldon lettich #christopher cosby #mel friedman #paul hertzog #david worth #carl kress #michael j. duthie #jean-claude van damme #action #biography #drama #35mm #1988 #62

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defconprime · 6 years ago

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TREKMATCH! # 163 - Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's "The Wire" vs 1974's Blazing Saddles

BLAZING SADDLES

In wild west days a couple racist unscrupulous business types install a new sheriff (who happens to be black) in a wild west town, presuming the also racist townspeople will hate him and abandon their homes. While there the sheriff befriends a washed up outlaw (who happens to be white), and together they work to deracist the town and save the day. There are a ton of classic bits of course like I needed to tell you like a farting bean situation if that tickles your fancy.

GRADE: B-

STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE - "The Wire"

While Garak and Julian are on one if their lunch dates Garak starts flipping out and collapsing in pain. Turns out he's got one of those implants in his head that he can turn on to release euphoria just in case he's ever tortured, and being forced to live in exile among humans and so forth is total torture for him. Hey pal, me too! (The pain is because his brain thingy is breaking). It's definitely a classic episode, and one of the best of the first two seasons for sure.

GRADE: A-

Victory to Trek, but movies are still up 82-81!

#trekmatch #star trek ds9 #star trek deep space nine #kim friedman #mel brooks

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fycarmensandiego · 4 years ago

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A chat with author Melissa Wiley

In 1996, HarperCollins published six Carmen Sandiego chapter books, featuring VILE villains from the then-current "Deluxe"/"CD-ROM"/"Classic" generation of computer games and a new lineup of Acme agents, headed by a Black female Chief (Lynne Thigpen ha impact), and focusing on kid detectives Maya and Ben.

The series included two books each by two writing teams and one solo act, Melissa Peterson. I got in touch with Melissa, who now uses the pen name Melissa Wiley, and she graciously answered some questions about writing the Carmen books and beyond.

To get you caught up to my knowledge before the interview, here's Melissa's website, and here's her bio as printed in the two Carmen books (accompanied by the caricature above):

Melissa Peterson is the author of several books for young readers. Born in Alamogordo, New Mexico, she has lived in eight different states and visited Germany and France. She has never ridden a dolphin, but she did eat a great deal of sour cherry ice cream outside the cathedral in Cologne. [Note: These are both references to plot points in Hasta la Vista, Blarney.] Her research for Hasta la Vista, Blarney included many hours playing Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? An official ACME Master Detective, she lives in New York City with her husband and young daughter.

FYCS: Thanks so much for agreeing to this interview.

Melissa Wiley: What a fun blast from the past! The Carmen books were my first professional writing gig and I had so much fun working on them.

That's so exciting to hear! With that being the case, how did you get involved with the books?

I was an assistant editor at HarperCollins, working for the wonderful Stephanie Spinner. I started out as her editorial assistant at Random House right after grad school and moved to Harper with her a year later, shortly after [my husband] Scott and I got married. Stephanie knew that I wanted to be a writer, and she often sent in-house writing assignments my way (lots of cover copy). When I left Harper in 1995 to have a baby, Stephanie recommended me for several book assignments, including the two Carmen Sandiego novels. That project had been underway for several months—Harper was doing a tie-in with the game and TV show. There were six books in total; two were assigned to me and four went to other writing teams [Ellen Weiss and Mel Friedman, and Bonnie Bader and Tracey West]. I often joke that I got my first modem, my first baby, and my first book deal in the same month!

I loved working with my Carmen Sandiego editor, Kris Gilson. The two books were a blast to write and a great learning opportunity for me. Ellen Weiss remains a good friend of mine. She's a true gem of a person!

Have your experiences writing the Carmen books influenced your work since then?

With Carmen, I discovered how much I love writing humor. Before that (in grad school), my poems and stories were on the serious side. I had so much fun with the playful, sometimes goofy tone of the Carmen Sandiego books that I definitely shifted afterward to more of a focus on humor in my books. I still find writing from a place of playfulness to be my most satisfying kind of work.

Were you familiar with Carmen Sandiego before writing the books?

I loved the computer game! I'd seen several episodes of the show—it's all a bit blurry now and hard to say which I encountered first—and really enjoyed it, but I especially loved the game. Instant classic!

How much guidance did you receive from HarperCollins / Brøderbund? Were the plots your own, or were you given plot outlines?

We were given the basic descriptions for the two kid detectives, and I had a couple of meetings with the editors and the other writers to flesh out the characters a bit more—give them personalities. I don't think Mel was in the meetings, but Ellen was there, and Tracey and Bonnie.

Then I wrote outlines for my two books and the other writers outlined theirs. I was assigned one "Where in the World" mystery and one "Where in Time" mystery. I think I submitted several plot ideas for each—the big challenge was thinking up interesting objects for Carmen and her henchmen to steal. The Blarney Stone and cocoa beans were my favorite ideas and I was thrilled that they got picked!

How did you research the books?

Those were AOL days, and the web wasn't yet a place for intensive research, so I spent a lot of time in the library. For The Cocoa Commotion, I conducted phone interviews with staff members at the Hershey chocolate factory—lots of fun. But I never did get to visit the Blarney Stone!

What was your favorite part of working on the books?

Researching the history of chocolate! Naturally I had to do a lot of sampling in order to describe it properly. ;)

Your author bio in the books mentions that the scene in which Maya and Ben eat sour cherry ice cream in Cologne, Germany was inspired by an actual experience of yours. Did any other experiences of yours make it into the books? Have you had any other travel experiences that notable? (Note: I'm originally from Northern Michigan, so travel experiences involving tart cherries are a high bar to clear for me.)

Ohhh, that sour cherry ice cream! I hope I get to taste it again someday. Apart from eating a lot of chocolate, I can't remember any other personal experiences that informed the books. If I were to write one today, I'd make sure to set a scene in Barcelona. My husband and I spent a week there in 2008 and it was an incredible trip. The paella! The Gaudí buildings! Art on every corner! I'd love to go back someday.

The bio also features a caricature of you with your baby daughter...

That drawing was made by the brilliant comic book artist Rick Burchett, who was working with Scott on Batman comics at the time. Scott was an editor at DC Comics and Rick was one of his favorite artists to work with. When I needed a bio illustration for the Carmen Sandiego books, we commissioned Rick to draw it. I love that piece so much! The baby is my oldest, Kate, who was born right around the time I started working on the books. We still have the original art!

You've written over 20 children's books for a variety of ages, in a variety of genres. Do you have any favorites among them?

That's so hard to say—I'm fond of all of them and I dearly loved creating worlds and adventures for Charlotte and Martha in my Little House prequels—but The Prairie Thief and The Nerviest Girl in the World are extra-special to me. I grew up in Aurora, Colorado and had a summer job at a wildlife refuge on the prairie, a landscape that served as the setting for Prairie Thief. I loved getting to weave secrets into the prairie setting that means so much to me.

Your most recent book, The Nerviest Girl in the World, was published last August. Can you tell us a bit about why you wrote it?

I lived for 11 years in La Mesa, California, a small town just outside San Diego. While I was there, I learned that in the very early days of silent film, there had been a film studio in town. Eventually the studio moved to Santa Barbara, but it was exciting to discover that before Hollywood was the center of the American film industry, little old La Mesa was a moviemaking place. I began reading everything I could find about the studio, and when I learned that many of the cowboys in those early Westerns were real cowboys and ranchers, an idea for a book began to take shape—the story of an adventurous girl who stumbled into work as a daredevil film actress along with her cowboy brothers.

Of course, I'm legally compelled to ask the question that literally every interview currently includes: how has the pandemic changed your job?

LOL! Yes, it's the question right now, isn't it! Well, I've worked at home since the Carmen Sandiego days, and I homeschool my kids, so in the biggest ways our lives weren't hugely affected by the shutdown. But I used to do a lot of my writing in cafés, and I miss that like crazy! I had to think up all sorts of new strategies for staying focused at home this past year. I'm hoping to get back to the coffee shops this summer!

Something I found really interesting is that you have a Patreon, which you explain you started to help pay for medical bills. How has that experience affected your work as an author?

I've played with lots of kinds of content on Patreon and really enjoy having a space to share behind-the-scenes stories. It's a more intimate and personal space than social media, so I feel free to let my hair down and be really frank.

Thanks so much for these fantastic questions! I had so much fun reminiscing about the Carmen Sandiego adventure!

#carmen sandiego #melissa wiley #interviews #mine #csm

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esonetwork · 4 months ago

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Best of Tales From Hollywoodland 1: Who Are the Most Influential Comedians of All Time?

In this podcast episode, Julian Schlossberg, Arthur Friedman, Steven J. Rubin, and producer Mike Faber engage in a rich discussion about the evolution of comedy and the influence of legendary comedians across different eras. They reminisce about the comedic genius of icons like Richard Pryor, Gene Wilder, Mel Brooks, Don Rickles, the cast of Saturday Night Live and Robin Williams to contemporary stars like Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd, Steve Carell, and many more.

We want to hear from you! Feedback is always welcome. Please write to us at [email protected] and why not subscribe and rate the show on Apple Podcast, Spotify, iHeartRadio, PlayerFM, Pandora, Amazon Music, Audible, and wherever fine podcasts are found.

Links

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aaknopf · 5 years ago

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Today we present a preview of a major new biography of Sylvia Plath, Red Comet, coming this fall. Through committed investigative scholarship, Heather Clark is able to offer the most extensively researched and nuanced view yet of a poet whose influence grows with each new generation of readers. Clark is the first biographer to draw upon all of Plath's surviving letters, including fourteen newly discovered letters Plath sent to her psychiatrist in 1961-63, and to draw extensively on her unpublished diaries, calendars, and poetry manuscripts. She is also the first to have had full, unfettered access to Ted Hughes's unpublished diaries and poetry manuscripts, allowing her to present a balanced and humane view of this remarkable creative marriage (and its unravelling) from both sides. She is able to present significant new findings about Plath's whereabouts and her state of health on the weekend leading up to her death. With these and many other "firsts," Clark's approach to Plath is to chart the course of this brilliant poet's development, highlighting her literary and intellectual growth rather than her undoing. Here, we offer a passage from Clark's prologue to the biography, followed by lines from one of Plath's celebrated "bee poems."

from Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

The Oxford professor Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf’s biographer, has written, “Women writers whose lives involved abuse, mental-illness, self-harm, suicide, have often been treated, biographically, as victims or psychological case-histories first and as professional writers second.” This is especially true of Sylvia Plath, who has become cultural shorthand for female hysteria. When we see a female character reading The Bell Jar in a movie, we know she will make trouble. As the critic Maggie Nelson reminds us, “to be called the Sylvia Plath of anything is a bad thing.” Nelson reminds us, too, that a woman who explores depression in her art isn’t perceived as “a shamanistic voyager to the dark side, but a ‘madwoman in the attic,’ an abject spectacle.” Perhaps this is why Woody Allen teased Diane Keaton for reading Plath’s seminal collection Ariel in Annie Hall. Or why, in the 1980s, a prominent reviewer cracked his favorite Plath joke as he reviewed Plath’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Collected Poems: “ ‘Why did SP cross the road?’ ‘To be struck by an oncoming vehicle.’ ” Male writers who kill themselves are rarely subject to such black humor: there are no dinner-party jokes about David Foster Wallace.

Since her suicide in 1963, Sylvia Plath has become a paradoxical symbol of female power and helplessness whose life has been subsumed by her afterlife. Caught in the limbo between icon and cliché, she has been mythologized and pathologized in movies, television, and biographies as a high priestess of poetry, obsessed with death. These distortions gained momentum in the 1960s when Ariel was published. Most reviewers didn’t know what to make of the burning, pulsating metaphors in poems like “Lady Lazarus” or the chilly imagery of “Edge.” Time called the book a “jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bale across the literary landscape.” The Washington Post dubbed Plath a “snake lady of misery” in an article entitled “The Cult of Plath.” Robert Lowell, in his introduction to Ariel, characterized Plath as Medea, hurtling toward her own destruction.

Recent scholarship has deepened our understanding of Plath as a master of performance and irony. Yet the critical work done on Plath has not sufficiently altered her popular, clichéd image as the Marilyn Monroe of the literati. Melodramatic portraits of Plath as a crazed poetic priestess are still with us. Her most recent biographer called her “a sorceress who had the power to attract men with a flash of her intense eyes, a tortured soul whose only destiny was death by her own hand.” He wrote that she “aspired to transform herself into a psychotic deity.” These caricatures have calcified over time into the popular, reductive version of Sylvia Plath we all know: the suicidal writer of The Bell Jar whose cultish devotees are black-clad young women. (“Sylvia Plath: The Muse of Teen Angst,” reads the title of a 2003 article in Psychology Today.) Plath thought herself a different kind of “sorceress”: “I am a damn good high priestess of the intellect,” she wrote her friend Mel Woody in July 1954.

Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote of Sylvia Plath, “when the curtain goes down, it is her own dead body there on the stage, sacrificed to her own plot.” Yet to suggest that Plath’s suicide was some sort of grand finale only perpetuates the Plath myth that simplifies our understanding of her work and her life. Sylvia Plath was one of the most highly educated women of her generation, an academic superstar and perennial prizewinner. Even after a suicide attempt and several months at McLean Hospital, she still managed to graduate from Smith College summa cum laude. She was accepted to graduate programs in English at Columbia, Oxford, and Radcliffe and won a Fulbright Fellowship to Cambridge, where she graduated with high honors. She was so brilliant that Smith asked her to return to teach in their English department without a PhD. Her mastery of English literature’s past and present intimidated her students and even her fellow poets. In Robert Lowell’s 1959 creative writing seminar, Plath’s peers remembered how easily she picked up on obscure literary allusions. “ ‘It reminds me of Empson,’ Sylvia would say . . . ‘It reminds me of Herbert.’ ‘Perhaps the early Marianne Moore?’ ” Later, Plath made small talk with T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender at London cocktail parties, where she was the model of wit and decorum.

Very few friends realized that she struggled with depression, which revealed itself episodically. In college, she aced her exams, drank in moderation, dressed sharply, and dated men from Yale and Amherst. She struck most as the proverbial golden girl. But when severe depression struck, she saw no way out. In 1953, a depressive episode led to botched electroshock therapy sessions at a notorious asylum. Plath told her friend Ellie Friedman that she had been led to the shock room and “electrocuted.” “She told me that it was like being murdered, it was the most horrific thing in the world for her. She said, ‘If this should ever happen to me again, I will kill myself.’ ” Plath attempted suicide rather than endure further tortures.

In 1963, the stressors were different. A looming divorce, single motherhood, loneliness, illness, and a brutally cold winter fueled the final depression that would take her life. Plath had been a victim of psychiatric mismanagement and negligence at age twenty, and she was terrified of depression’s “cures,” as she wrote in her last letter to her psychiatrist—shock treatment, insulin injections, institutionalization, “a mental hospital, lobotomies.” It is no accident that Plath killed herself on the day she was supposed to enter a British psychiatric ward.

Sylvia Plath did not think of herself as a depressive. She considered herself strong, passionate, intelligent, determined, and brave, like a character in a D. H. Lawrence novel. She was tough-minded and filled her journal with exhortations to work harder—evidence, others have said, of her pathological, neurotic perfectionism. Another interpretation is that she was—like many male writers—simply ambitious, eager to make her mark on the world. She knew that depression was her greatest adversary, the one thing that could hold her back. She distrusted psychiatry—especially male psychiatrists—and tried to understand her own depression intellectually through the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Erich Fromm, and others. Self-medication, for Plath, meant analyzing the idea of a schizoid self in her honors thesis on The Brothers Karamazov.

Bitter experience taught her how to accommodate depression—exploit it, even—in her art. “There is an increasing market for mental-hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don’t relive, or recreate it,” she wrote in her journal. The remark sounds trite, but her writing on depression was profound. Her own immigrant family background and experience at McLean gave her insight into the lives of the outcast. Plath would fill her late work, sometimes controversially, with the disenfranchised—women, the mentally ill, refugees, political dissidents, Jews, prisoners, divorcées, mothers. As she matured, she became more determined to speak out on their behalf. In The Bell Jar, one of the greatest protest novels of the twentieth century, she probed the link between insanity and repression. Like Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, the novel exposed a repressive Cold War America that could drive even the “best minds” of a generation crazy. Are you really sick, Plath asks, or has your society made you so? She never romanticized depression and death; she did not swoon into darkness. Rather, she delineated the cold, blank atmospherics of depression, without flinching. Plath’s ability to resurface after her depressive episodes gave her courage to explore, as Ted Hughes put it, “psychological depth, very lucidly focused and lit.” The themes of rebirth and renewal are as central to her poems as depression, rage, and destruction.

“What happens to a dream deferred?” Langston Hughes asked in his poem “Harlem.” Did it “crust and sugar over—/ like a syrupy sweet?” For most women of Plath’s generation, it did. But Plath was determined to follow her literary vocation. She dreaded the condescending label of “lady poet,” and she had no intention of remaining unmarried and childless like Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. She wanted to be a wife, mother, and poet—a “triple-threat woman,” as she put it to a friend. These spheres hardly ever overlapped in the sexist era in which she was trapped, but for a time, she achieved all three goals.

They thought death was worth it, but I Have a self to recover, a queen. Is she dead, is she sleeping? Where has she been, With her lion-red body, her wings of glass?

Now she is flying More terrible than she ever was, red Scar in the sky, red comet Over the engine that killed her— The mausoleum, the wax house.

from “Stings” by Sylvia Plath

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark

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#poetry #poetry month #poem-a-day #sylvia plath #red comet #heather clark #National Poetry Month

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randomlyrandoms · 4 years ago

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Celebrity Deaths 2020

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FEBRUARY Gene Reynolds - Feb. 3 (Director) Nadia Lutfi - Feb. 4 (Movie Actress) Kamau Brathwaite - Feb. 4 (Poet) Kirk Douglas - Feb. 5 (Movie Actor) Beverly Pepper - Feb. 5 (Sculptor) *Raphael Coleman - Feb. 6 (Movie Actor) Jhon Jairo Velásquez - Feb. 6 (Criminal) Orson Bean - Feb. 7 (Movie Actor) Paula Kelly - Feb. 8 (Stage Actress) Robert Conrad - Feb. 8 (TV Actor) Qing Han - Feb. 8 (Illustrator) Keelin Shanley - Feb. 8 (Journalist) Mirella Freni - Feb. 9 (Opera Singer) Abam Bocey - Feb. 10 (Comedian) Lyle Mays - Feb. 10 (Planist) Louis-Edmond Hamelin - Feb. 11 (Non-Fiction Author) Jamie Gilson - Feb. 11 (Children's Author) Hamish Milne - Feb. 12 (Pianist) Jimmy Thunder - Feb. 13 (Boxer) Lynn Cohen - Feb. 14 (Movie Actress) Esther Scott - Feb. 14 (Voice Actress) John Shrapnel - Feb. 14 (Movie Actor) Caroline Flack - Feb. 15 (TV Show Host) Amie Harwick - Feb. 15 (Doctor) Vatroslav Mimica - Feb. 15 (Director) Jason Davis - Feb. 16 (Voice Actor) Zoe Caldwell - Feb. 16 (Stage Actress) Tony Fernandez - Feb. 16 (Baseball Player) Frances Cuka - Feb. 16 (TV Actress) Harry Gregg - Feb. 16 (Soccer Player) Ja'net Dubois - Feb. 17 (TV Actress) Owen Bieber - Feb. 17 (Activist) Charles Portis - Feb. 17 (Novelist) Lindsey Lagestee - Feb. 18 (Country Singer) Ashraf Sinclair - Feb. 18 (Movie Actor) Pop Smoke - Feb. 19 (Rapper) Jose Mojica Marins - Feb. 19 (Director) Gust Graas - Feb. 19 (Painter) Lisel Mueller - Feb. 21 (Poet) Tao Porchon-Lynch - Feb. 21 (Fitness Instructor) Katherine Johnson - Feb. 24 (Mathematician) Clive Cussler - Feb. 24 (Oceanographer) David Roback - Feb. 24 (Guitarist) Ben Cooper - Feb. 24 (Movie Actor) Mario Bunge - Feb. 24 (Philosopher) Jahn Teigen - Feb. 24 (Pop Singer) Dieter Laser - Feb. 29 (Movie Actor)

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AUGUST Wilford Brimley - Aug. 1 (TV Actor) Ryan Breaux - Aug. 2 (Family Member) *Frank Ocean's Brother* Leon Fleisher - Aug. 2 (Pianist) John Hume - Aug. 3 (Politician) Dick Goddard - Aug. 4 (TV Show Host) FBG Duck - Aug. 4 (Rapper) Horace Clarke Aug. 5 (Baseball Player) Isidora Bjelica - Aug. 5 (Playwright) James Drury - Aug. 6 (Movie Actor) Kurt Luedtke - Aug. 9 (Screenwriter) Tetsuya Watari - Aug. 10 (Movie Actor) Trini Lopez - Aug. 11 (World Music Singer) Ash Christian - Aug. 13 (TV Actor) Linda Manz - Aug. 14 (Movie Actress) Julian Bream - Aug. 14 (Guitarist) Shwikar - Aug. 14 (Movie Actress) Robert Trump - Aug. 15 (Family Memeber) *Donald Trump's Brother Emman Nimedez - Aug. 16 (Director) Kobe Nunez - Aug. 17 (YouTube Star) Gary Cowling - Aug. 17 (Stage Actor) Dale Hawerchuk - Aug. 18 (Hockey Player) Ben Cross - Aug. 18 (Movie Actor) Jack Sherman - Aug. 18 (Guitarist) Landon Clifford - Aug. 19 (YouTube Star) Chi Chi DeVayne - Aug. 20 (Reality Star) Frankie Banali - Aug. 20 (Drummer) Allan Rich - Aug. 22 (Movie Actor) Lori Nelson - Aug. 23 (Movie Actress) Benny Chan - Aug. 23 (TV Actor) Riley Gale - Aug. 24 (Rock Singer) Gail Sheehy - Aug. 24 (Non-Fiction Author) Lute Olson - Aug. 27 (Basketball Coach) **Chadwick Boseman - Aug. 28 (Movie Actor) El Loco Valdés - Aug. 28 (Comedian) Cliff Robinson - Aug. 29 (Basketball Player) John Thompson - Aug. 30 (Basketball Coach) Tom Seaver - Aug. 31 (Baseball Player) Pranab Mukherjee - Aug. 31 (Politician)

SEPTEMBER Erick Morillo - Sept. 1 (DJ) Ian Mitchell - Sept. 2 (Guitarist) Annie Cordy - Sept. 4 (Movie Actress) Lloyd Cadena - Sept. 4 (YouTube Star) Lucille Starr - Sept. 4 (Country Singer) Ethan Peters - Sept. 5 (Instagram Star) Kevin Dobson - Sept. 6 (Soap Opera Actor) Lou Brock - Sept. 6 (Baseball Player) Xavier Ortiz - Sept. 7 (TV Actor) Stevie Lee - Sept. 9 (Movie Actor) Diana Rigg - Sept. 10 (Movie Actress) Barbara Jefford - Sept. 12 (Stage Actress) Anthony Woodle - Sept. 13 (Director) Alien Huang - Sept. 16 (TV Show Host) Winston Groom - Sept. 17 (Novelist) Ruth Bader Ginsburg - Sept. 18 (Supreme Court Justice) Destiny Riekeberg - Sept. 19 (TikTok Star) Jackie Stallone - Sept. 21 (Family Member) *Sylvester Stallone's Mother* Michael Lonsdale - Sept. 21 (Movie Actor) Tommy DeVito - Sept. 21 (Guitarist) Zaywoah - Sept. 22 (Instagram Star) Joe Laurinaitis - Sept. 22 (Wrestler) Archie Lyndhurst - Sept. 22 (TV Actor) Juliette Greco - Sept. 23 (Movie Actress) Gale Sayers - Sept. 23 (Football Player) Dean Jones - Sept. 24 (Cricket Player) Yuko Takeuchi - Sept. 27 (TV Actress) Mac Davis - Sept. 29 (Country Singer) Helen Reddy - Sept. 29 (Pop Singer) Archie Lyndhurst - Sept. 30 (TV Actor) Quino - Sept. 30 (Cartoonist)

OCTOBER Derek Mahon - Oct. 1 (Poet) Murray Schisgal - Oct. 1 (Screenwriter) Bob Gibson - Oct. 2 (Baseball Player) Thomas Jefferson Byrd - Oct. 3 (Movie Actor) Kenzo Takada - Oct. 4 (Fashion Designer) Armelia McQueen - Oct. 4 (Stage Actress) Johhny Nash - Oct. 6 (Pop Singer) Eddie Van Halen - Oct. 6 (Guitarist) Tommy Rall - Oct. 6 (Dancer) Mario Molina - Oct. 7 (Chemist) Whitey Ford - Oct. 8 (Baseball Player) María García Galisteo - Oct. 9 (TV Actress) Joe Morgan - Oct. 11 (Baseball Player) Conchata Ferrell - Oct. 12 (TV Actress) Saint Dog - Oct. 13 (Rapper) Rhonda Fleming - Oct. 14 (Movie Actress) Fred Dean - Oct. 14 (Football Player) Johnny Bush - Oct. 16 (Country Singer) Doreen Montalvo - Oct. 17 (Stage Actress) Pinky Curvy - Oct. 17 (Instagram Star) James Redford - Oct. 17 (Director) Sid Hartman - Oct. 18 (Journalist) Spencer Davis - Oct. 19 (Guitarist) Marge Champion - Oct. 21 (Dancer) Frank Bough Oct. 21 (TV Show Host) Matt Blair - Oct. 22 (Football Player) Kastiop - Oct. 23 (YouTube Star) Jerry Jeff Walker - Oct. 23 (Country Singer) Diane DiPrima - Oct. 25 (Poet) Lee Kun-hee - Oct. 25 (Entrepreneur) DeOndra Dixon - Oct. 26 (Family Member) *Jamie Foxx's Sister* Billy Joe Shaver - Oct. 28 (Country Singer) Tracy Smothers - Oct. 28 (Wrestler) Bobby Ball - Oct. 28 (Comedian) Leanza Cornett - Oct. 28 (Pageant Contestant) Travis Roy - Oct. 29 (Memoirist) Nobby Stiles - Oct. 30 (Soccer Player) Herb Adderley - Oct. 30 (Football Player) *Sean Connery - Oct. 31 (Movie Actor) Rance Allen - Oct. 31 (Religious Leader) Betty Dodson - Oct. 31 (Novelist) MF Doom - Oct. 31 (Rapper)

NOVEMBER Eddie Hassell - Nov. 1 (TV Actor) Nikki McKibbin - Nov. 1 (Pop Singer) Magda Rodríguez - Nov. 1 (TV Producer) John Sessions - Nov. 2 (Comedian) Max Ward - Nov. 2 (Entrepreneur) Elsa Raven - Nov. 3 (Movie Actress) Ken Hensley - Nov. 4 (Rock Singer) Geoffrey Palmer - Nov. 5 (Movie Actor) BraxAttacks - Nov. 5 (Rapper) King Von - Nov. 6 (Rapper) SauxePaxk TB - Nov. 6 (Rapper) **Alex Trebek - Nov. 8 (Game Show Host) Bert Belasco - Nov. 8 (TV Actor) Tom Heinsohn - Nov. 10 (Basketball Player) Phyllis McGuire - Nov. 11 (Football Player) Mo3 - Nov. 11 (Rapper) Asif Basra - Nov. 12 (Movie Actor) Doug Supernaw - Nov. 13 (Country Singer) Paul Hornung - Nov. 13 (Football Player) Des O'Connor - Nov. 14 (TV Show Host) Soumitra Chatterjee - Nov. 15 (Movie Actor) Ray Clemence - Nov. 15 (Soccer Player) Kirby Morrow Nov. 18 (Voice Actor) Bobby Brown Jr - Nov. 18 (Family Member) *Bobby Brown's Son* Jake Scott - Nov. 19 (Football Player) Jan Morris - Nov. 20 (Non-Fiction Author) Mustafa Nadarevic - Nov. 22 (TV Actor) Hal Ketchum - Nov. 23 (Country Singer) David Dinkins - Nov. 23 (Politician) Abby Dalton - Nov. 23 (TV Actress) i_o - Nov. 23 (DJ) Joe Luna - Nov. 23 (Comedian) Bob Ryder - Nov. 24 (Journalist) Aaron Melzer - Nov. 24 (Rock Singer) Flor Silvestre - Nov. 25 (World Music Singer) Ahmad Mukhtar - Nov. 25 (Politician) Heavy D - Nov. 25 (Reality Star) Diego Maradona - Nov. 25 (Soccer Player) Markus Paul - Nov. 25 (Football Coach) Sadiq Al-Mahdi - Nov. 26 (Politician) Tony Hsieh - Nov. 27 (Entrepreneur) David Prowse - Nov. 28 (Bodybuilder) Lil Yase Nov. 28 (Rapper) Ben Bova - Nov. 29 (Non-Fiction Author) Papa Bouba Diop - Nov. 29 (Soccer Player) Jerry Demara - Nov. 30 (World Music Singer) Paid Will - Nov. 30 (Rapper) Nobby Stiles - Nov. 30 (Soccer Player)

DECEMBER Hugh Keays-Byrne - Dec. 1 (Movie Actor) Alexis Sharkey - Dec. 1 (Instagram Star) Michael Marion - Dec. 1 (Family Member) *Bobbie Thomas's Husband* Pamela Tiffin - Dec. 2 (Movie Actress) DC Fontana - Dec. 2 (Screenwriter) Pat Patterson - Dec. 2 (Wrestler) Alison Lurie - Dec. 3 (Novelist) Whitney Collings - Dec. 3 (Reality Star) David Lander - Dec. 4 (TV Actor) Sara Carreira - Dec. 5 (Instagram Star) Tabaré Vázquez - Dec. 6 (Politician) Natalie Desselle-Reid - Dec. 7 (TV Actress) Dick Allen - Dec. 7 (Baseball Player) Joselyn Cano - Dec. 7 (Instagram Star) Alejandro Sabella - Dec. 8 (Soccer Coach) Paolo Rossi - Dec. 9 (Soccer Player) V.J. Chitra - Dec. 9 (TV Actress) Phil Linz - Dec. 9 (Baseball Player) Barbara Windsor - Dec. 10 (Soap Opera Actress) Tommy Lister - Dec. 10 (Movie Actor) Carol Sutton - Dec. 10 (Movie Actress) Kim Ki-duk - Dec. 11 (Director) John Le Carre - Dec. 12 (Novelist) Ann Reinking - Dec. 12 (Stage Actress) Terry Kay - Dec. 12 (Novelist) Charley Pride - Dec. 12 (Country Singer) Gérard Houllier - Dec. 14 (Soccer Coach) *Jeremy Bulloch - Dec. 17 (Movie Actor) Rosalind Knight - Dec. 19 (TV Actress) K.T. Oslin - Dec. 21 (Country Singer) PlasmaMasterDon - Dec. 21 (YouTube Star) Stella Tennant - Dec. 22 (Model) Rika Zarai - Dec. 23 (World Music Singer) Rebecca Luker - Dec. 23 (Stage Actress) Leslie West - Dec. 23 (Guitarist) Kay Purcell - Dec. 23 (TV Actress) Danny Hodge - Dec. 24 (Wrestler) Genevieve Musci - Dec. 25 (YouTube Star) KC Jones - Dec. 25 (Basketball Player) Tony Rice - Dec. 25 (Guitarist) Lin Qi - Dec. 25 (Entrepreneur) Brodie Lee - Dec. 26 (Wrestler) Phil Niekro - Dec. 26 (Baseball Player) Tito Rojas - Dec. 26 (Folk Singer) Ty Jordan - Dec. 26 (Football Player) Nick McGlashan - Dec. 27 (Reality Star) William Link - Dec. 27 (Screenwriter) Fou Ts'ong - Dec. 28 (Pianist) Armando Manzanero - Dec. 28 (Composer) Jessica Campbell - Dec. 29 (Movie Actress) Pierre Cardin - Dec. 29 (Entrepreneur) Luke Letlow - Dec. 29 (Politician) Shabba Doo - Dec. 30 (Movie Actor) Frank Kimbrough - Dec. 30 (Pianist) Phyllis McGuire - Dec. 31 (Pop Singer) Alexi Laiho - Dec. ?? (Guitarist)

#CelebrityDeaths2020

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 years ago

Text

#1yrago Happy Public Domain day: for real, for the first time in 20 years!

Every year, Jennifer Jenkins and Jamie Boyle from the Duke Center for the Public Domain compile a "Public Domain Day" list (previously) that highlights the works that are not entering the public domain in America, thanks to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which hit the pause button on Americans' ability to freely use their artistic treasures for two decades -- a list that also included the notable works entering the public domain in more sensible countries of the Anglophere, like Canada and the UK, where copyright "only" lasted for 50 years after the author's death.

But this year, it's different.

This is the year that America unpauses its public domain; it's also the year that Canadian PM Justin Trudeau capitulated to Donald Trump and retroactively extended copyright on works in Canada for an extra 20 years, ripping works out of Canada's public domain, making new works based on them into illegal art (more proof that good hair and good pecs don't qualify you to be a good leader -- see also: V. Putin -- not even when paired with high-flying, cheap rhetoric).

Even as Canada's public domain has radically contracted, America's has, for the first, time, opened.

So this year's American Public Domain Day List is, for the first time in 20 years, not a work melancholy alternate history, but rather a celebration of works that Americans are newly given access to without restriction or payment, for free re-use and adaptation, in the spirit of such classics as Snow White, West Side Story, My Fair Lady, All You Need is Love, and more (More than 1,000 in all, summarized in this handy spreadsheet -- thanks Gary!).

Films * Safety Last!, directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, featuring Harold Lloyd * The Ten Commandments, directed by Cecil B. DeMille * The Pilgrim, directed by Charlie Chaplin * Our Hospitality, directed by Buster Keaton and John G. Blystone * The Covered Wagon, directed by James Cruze * Scaramouche, directed by Rex Ingram

Books * Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan and the Golden Lion * Agatha Christie, The Murder on the Links * Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis * e.e. cummings, Tulips and Chimneys * Robert Frost, New Hampshire * Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet * Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay * D.H. Lawrence, Kangaroo * Bertrand and Dora Russell, The Prospects of Industrial Civilization * Carl Sandberg, Rootabaga Pigeons * Edith Wharton, A Son at the Front * P.G. Wodehouse, works including The Inimitable Jeeves and Leave it to Psmith * Viginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

Music * Yes! We Have No Bananas, w.&m. Frank Silver & Irving Cohn * Charleston, w.&m. Cecil Mack & James P. Johnson * London Calling! (musical), by Noel Coward * Who’s Sorry Now, w. Bert Kalmar & Harry Ruby, m. Ted Snyder * Songs by “Jelly Roll” Morton including Grandpa’s Spells, The Pearls, and Wolverine Blues (w. Benjamin F. Spikes & John C. Spikes; m. Ferd “Jelly Roll” Morton) * Works by Bela Bartok including the Violin Sonata No. 1 and the Violin Sonata No. 2 * Tin Roof Blues, m. Leon Roppolo, Paul Mares, George Brunies, Mel Stitzel, & Benny Pollack (There were also compositions from 1923 by other well-known artists including Louis Armstrong, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, WC Handy, Oscar Hammerstein, Gustav Holst, Al Jolson, Jerome Kern, and John Phillip Sousa; though their most famous works were from other years.)

And as great as that list is, it's hardly a patch on the amazing works we'd be inheriting if the Sonny Bono law hadn't been passed and the 1978 law was still on the books -- works whose authors fully expected them to be in the public domain as of tomorrow:

Books * Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time * Rachel Carson, Silent Spring * Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August * Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools * James Baldwin, Another Country * Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle * Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions * Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire * Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange * Michael Harrington, The Other America * Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom * J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World * Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes * Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest * Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? * Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich * Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook * Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl * Ingri d’Aulaire and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire, D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths

Movies * Lawrence of Arabia * The Longest Day * The Manchurian Candidate * Dr. No * Jules and Jim * Sanjuro * Birdman of Alcatraz * Mutiny on the Bounty * Days of Wine and Roses * How the West Was Won

Music * Dream Baby (How Long Must I Dream), by Cindy Walker, performed by Roy Orbison * Blowin’ in the Wind, Bob Dylan * Watermelon Man, Herbie Hancock (from his first album, Takin’ Off) * Twistin’ the Night Away, Sam Cooke * You Can’t Judge a Book by the Cover and You Shook Me, Willie Dixon * Surfin’ Safari, The Beach Boys * Songs from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Stephen Sondheim * Dream Baby (How Long Must I Dream), Cindy Walker * Big Girls Don’t Cry, Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio * Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield * Little Boxes, Malvina Reynolds * The Loco-Motion, Gerry Goffin and Carole King * Soldier Boy, Luther Dixon and Florence Greenberg

And, as Jenkins and Boyle point out, the largely hidden casualty of copyright term extension is the scholarship and research published in academic journals, who paid nothing for these works, and who have locked them up for decades to come:

https://boingboing.net/2018/12/31/thanks-justin.html

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