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Dorothy Kilgallen story optioned for big screen biopic

October 3rd, 2008 by Scott Marks

Arlene Francis, Bennett Cerf, Dorothy Kilgallen & John Charles Daly

November 8, 1965 was the last time Dorothy Kilgallen, syndicated columnist of The Voice of Broadway, appeared as a member of the What’s My Line? panel. Twelve hours after that live Sunday night broadcast, Ms. Kilgallen was found dead on the third floor of her five-story New York townhouse.

It was her 515th stint as a regular panelist on the popular and erudite (by game show standards) quiz program and for years controversy has surrounded her death. Viewers of her last show saw a visibly disoriented Ms. Kilgallen slur, sweat and stammer her way through the thirty minute program. A career substance abuser (mostly booze), when her hairdresser arrived the next morning, he discovered the lifeless body of the chinless columnist. The cause of death was listed as a combination of alcohol and Seconal, possibly concurrent with a heart attack. Unable to determine whether or not her demise was a suicide or an accident, medical examiner James Luke added “circumstances undetermined” to the death certificate.

According to Variety, producer John Davis (Dudley Do-Right, I Robot, Fat Albert, Norbit) has optioned Good Night, Dorothy Kilgallen, a proposal for an expose book by Paul Alexander that ties the columnist’s death to her investigation of the JFK assassination. Kilgallen was an outspoken critic of the Warren Commission. A friend of JFK’s, she began a crusade to single-handedly uncover a conspiracy behind his murder. She conducted an interview with assassin’s assassin Jack Ruby that purported to contain important new information on the murder of President Kennedy. She conceived the interview as a centerpiece for her expose Murder One, Alexander’s book insists that Kilgallen died mysteriously and the notebooks containing the information she was about to publish disappeared.

While the Kennedy cover-up might have been her last bout with controversy, it wasn’t her first. Frank Sinatra refused to appear on What’s My Line due to a long standing feud with the singer that began after an antagonistic 1956 article titled The Frank Sinatra Story. Frank went out of his was to belittle the “chinless wonder” in his Vegas act and it wasn’t until years after her death that Sinatra finally agreed to appear as a WML? mystery guest. In addition to Mr. Sinatra, she also fought with Jack Paar and Arthur Godfrey. Her feud with Paar was based on his support of Fidel Castro and Kilgallen, a staunch anti-Communist, criticized him for it.

Producer John Davis will bring the project to Fox through his first-look deal. No talk yet of who they will get to play Ms. Kilgallen, but I’m rooting for Patricia Clarkson. As for the Bennett Cerf role, my vote goes to Dave Thomas! Sadly, SCTV’s What’s My Shoe Size? is no longer on available YouTube, so you’ll just have to make due with the real thing.

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Filed Under Gossip, News

New Photos Added: JERRY LEWIS, THE ADDAMS FAMILY, Liv Tyler, CLUTCH CARGO, Goldie Hawn, WHAT’S MY LINE?, Ernest Borgnine, etc.

July 7th, 2008 by Scott Marks

THE ADDAMS FAMILY

THE ADDAMS FAMILY - 5 Photos Added

Jerry Lewis’ THE BELLBOY (1960) - 8 Lobby Cards Added

BORGNINE IN BANLON!!!

BORGNINE IN BANLON!!!

Ernest Borgnine in The Split (1968) - 3 Color Stills Added

CLUTCH CARGO Bobble Heads

CLUTCH CARGO, with his pals Spinner & Paddlefoot! - 5 Photos Added

Continue reading New Photos Added: JERRY LEWIS, THE ADDAMS FAMILY, Liv Tyler, CLUTCH CARGO, Goldie Hawn, WHAT’S MY LINE?, Ernest Borgnine, etc.

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Filed Under Image Blog

Judy Garland Back From The Dead For Two Nights Only!!!

June 10th, 2008 by Scott Marks

The Lufts: Joey, Judy, Lorna & ‘One Punch’

This time we don’t have Liza to blame. Not even Lorna. Joey Luft, son of Liza’s mother and Sid ‘One Punch’ Luft, is out promoting a concert that features videos of Judy singing her greatest hits with the symphonic below average white band The Boston Pops backing them up.

“I’ll never forget watching my mom perform,” Joey cooed, “the passion she brought to the stage and the way she could captivate an audience. I believe Judy Garland In Concert captures that experience.”

This is not your average tribute show. This is not a Jim Bailey lookalike. Hell, this is barely passsable entertainment!

In their glorified press release, Billboard calls Judy “the original American Idol,” Given the amount of work he must have put into signing the contract, that makes Joey the original idle American.

“This is the great American songbook of the 20th century performed by the foremost interpreter of these songs,” said James Sanna, Executive Producer of Judy Garland In Concert. “In every respect, it’s the greatest Judy Garland concert ever. Audiences are in for an amazing one-of-a-kind experience that includes favorites like Over the Rainbow, That’s Entertainment, Chicago and many others.”

Don’t they know that Judy’s greatest concert was that fateful night in 1956 when she found herself “indisposed” and called on Jerry Lewis to take to the Vegas stage for his first solo performance after the breakup with Dean?

For you necrophiliacs and/or Baby Gumm fanatics, tickets are on sale now at Boston’s Symphony Hall Box Office. Prices for the June 28 & 29 “concerts” range from $19 to $87. You’d be better off spending your money on the 3 DVD Wizard of Oz box set.

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Filed Under Rants

Dig A Hole: Richard Widmark

March 29th, 2008 by Scott Marks

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He burst onto the movie scene with a snarling cackle in Henry Hathaway’s 1947 film noir Kiss of Death. Richard Widmark’s Tommy Udo was unlike anything the screen had seen. Udo was a career psychopath who took giddy delight in dispatching a wheelchair-bound granny down a flight of stairs.

Richard Widmark was born on Boxing Day (the Day After Christmas), 1914 in Sunrise, Minnesota. He spent his early years in Princeton, IL before taking acting classes at Lake Forest College. (His initial goal was to obtain a law degree.) After graduating he taught acting at the college until 1938 when he made his New York radio debut in Aunt Jenny’s Real Life Stories. Five years later he was on Broadway appearing in Kiss and Tell. A perforated eardrum kept him out of the service so Mr. Widmark continued on doing what he did best, acting.

While appearing with June Havoc in the Chicago company of Dream Girl, Widmark answered Hollywood’s call by signing a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox. In an interview with the Associated Press, the actor revealed that he almost lost the career-making role of Tommy Udo. “The director, Henry Hathaway, didn’t want me,” the actor recalled. “I have a high forehead; he thought I looked too intellectual.” Fortunately the director was overruled by studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck, but according to Widmark, Hathaway “gave me kind of a bad time.”

The role earned Widmark a best supporting actor nomination and made him an overnight movie star. Between 1947 and 1954 Widmark took on the roles of psychopaths (The Street With No Name, Road House), a two bit hustler (Night and the City), a jilted airline pilot (Don’t Bother to Knock), a racist (No Way Out), a western villain (Yellow Sky), a “smoke jumper” (Red Skies of Montana), numerous military types (Halls of Montezuma, The Frogmen, Destination Gobi and Take the High Ground) and perhaps most precariously, George ‘Foghorn’ Winslow’s father in My Pal Gus. Only a dissolute wretch could spawn a boy like Georgie.

By 1950, Widmark was 20th Century Fox’s star player. That year, Elia Kazan was the first to cast the actor against type in Panic in the Streets. Widmark assumed the role of a physician in pursuit of the film’s plague-infected villain Jack Palance.

No director better understood Widmark’s ardent blend of charisma and combustible uncertainty than Sam Fuller in Pickup on South Street. Widmark plays Skip McCoy, a small time grifter who unwittingly lifts a roll of top secret microfilm, headed for the commies, from a dame on a subway. Fuller’s camera movements are even more agile than usual in order to keep up with the sportive actor. Skip doesn’t care much how he gets his money. When informed that the person paying for the stolen film is a Red, Skip spits back, “Who cares? Your money is as good as anyone else’s.” In the end, his moll must endure a savage beating before McCoy finally takes action against the red menace.

It’s odd that a man of Widmark’s concordant demeanor would wind up making a living playing tough guys. “I know I’ve made kind of a half-assed career out of violence, but I abhor violence,” he remarked in a 1976 Associated Press interview. “I am an ardent supporter of gun control. It seems incredible to me that we are the only civilized nation that does not put some effective control on guns.”

After appearing in 20 successful films at Fox, Daryl F. Zanuck, the man who fought to keep Widmark in Kiss of Death, refused to renew the actor’s contract. As if to add insult to injury Zanuck cast him in a supporting role billed below Spencer Tracy, Jean Peters AND Robert Wagner in Broken Lance. He starred in one other Fuller film while owned by Fox and hated every minute of it. Widmark was forced to appear in Hell and High Water and did not like the fact that his co-star Bela Darvi got her role by sleeping with Zanuck.

It wasn’t all thugs and psychos for Richard Widmark. After breaking with Fox in 1954, Widmark formed his own production company, Heath Productions, and began working for other studios. He found great success as psychiatric clinic chieftain Dr. Stewart McIver, a man convinced that the road to mental stability begins with drapes, in Vincente Minnelli’s hysterical CinemaScope melodrama The Cobweb. (When are they going to release a box set of Minnelli’s ‘Scope melodramas?) Before seeing this film, I never once considered putting my slacks on before my shirt. For me, that’s like putting your socks on before your shoes, but Widmark made it all look so commonsensical.

Widmark tried hard as The Dauphin in Preminger’s St. Joan, tackled social issues (Time Limit and the never ending Judgment at Nuremberg) and appeared to trade in his fedora for a ten gallon hat with a string of “A” westerns (The Last Wagon, The Law and Jake Wade, Warlock) topped off by John Wayne’s The Alamo. The Duke wasn’t crazy about scrawny Widmark in the role of strapping Jim Bowie, but United Artists was insistent.

Henry Brandon, Richard Widmark & James Stewart in John Ford’s Two Rode Together

His strongest role in a 60s western was opposite Jimmy Stewart in John Ford’s Two Rode Together. Both he and Stewart were hard-of-hearing (as well as balding), so the extraordinarily cruel Ford would purposely park his director’s chair far away from them and offer up his directions in a barely audible voice. When neither one of the stars could hear their director, Pappy the barbarian would loudly announced to his crew that after over 40 years in the business, he was reduced to directing two deaf toupees. Better bald and deaf than a sadistic, one-eyed, handkerchief-sucking lush.

His finest work of the decade was in Don Siegel’s tough, pre-Dirty Harry cop thriller Madigan. The film was such a hit, it spawned a short-lived TV series.

He worked consistently throughout the seventies, but with the exception of Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming, there isn’t much worth recommending. By the time he got around to Coma, The Swarm and Hanky Panky, Widmark smelled the decay and with the exception of a few scattered roles, pretty much abandoned acting after Against All Odds (1984).

He remained married to the woman he met while taking drama classes at Lake Forest College. When he wasn’t working, he and his wife playwright Jean Hazelwood lived a life of quiet seclusion alternating between a horse ranch in Hidden Valley, California and a farm in Connecticut. After 55 years together, their love story ended in 1997 with Ms. Hazelwood’s death. They had one child, a daughter named Ann who became the wife of baseball immortal Sandy Koufax.

With Widmark gone, that leaves only one of film noir’s top five male icons (Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan, Lee Marvin, Kirk Douglas and Widmark) still alive. It wouldn’t hurt so bad if there were other around capable of filling their shoes. Who am I kidding? No one will ever fill Richard Widmark’s shoes.

Photos: TWO RODE TOGETHER

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Filed Under Obituaries