If anyone in Hollywood knows what it takes to get through epidemics, it's Norman Lloyd. This protean actor was 3 in New York when the Spanish flu erupted in February 1918 and infected some 500 million people, about one-third of the world's population. It came in four waves, and finally subsided in April 1920.
Norman…
"I'm working in the outhouse again." That's how Ben Hecht, the fabled screenwriter, used to describe toiling in Hollywood. "And the nitwits are still in charge," he assured his friends.
Hecht wrote terrific movies like Scarface and Notorious but he hated studio chiefs, and it was mutual. His name came to mind last…
On Episode 10 of The Deadline Podcast, we talk about how several new films may be short-changing their potential because they out-live their welcome, with the 163 minute running time for otherwise superb Blade Runner 2049 as one example. Also, Hollywood's mistakes in dealing with sex either as film product or in terms…
In the IFC Midnight documentary 78/52, director Alexandre O. Phillippe thoroughly dissects the memorable — and terrifying — shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s game-changing horror film Psycho. With the help of filmmakers, critics, and fans including Guillermo del Toro, Bret Easton Ellis, Jamie Lee Curtis, Eli Roth and…
C.O. “Doc” Erickson, a production manager on several Alfred Hitchcock and John Huston films who went on to produce such films as Chinatown, Blade Runner, Fast Times at Ridgemont High andGroundhog Day, died Wednesday in Las Vegas of heart complications. He was 93.
Born December 17, 1923 in Kankakee, IL, Erickson began…
Costume designer Rita Riggs, who sewed stuffed crows onto Tippi Hedren’s iconic green dress for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and made sure that Archie Bunker’s single pair of trousers stayed mended through a seven-year stretch of All in the Family, died Monday in Los Angeles. She was 86.
“He had seven white shirts,”…
EXCLUSIVE: In April 1945, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force ordered that footage shot by combat and newsreel cameramen during the liberation of Occupied Europe be aggregated into a documentary film that would be shown to the German prisoners of war as irrefutable proof of what had occurred under the…
Oscar-winning actress Joan Fontaine has died, per the AP and multiple news reports. She was 96. Born Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland to British parents in Japan, Fontaine began her film career under contract with RKO in films like The Man Who Found Himself (1937), her official onscreen “introduction,” A Damsel in Distres…
Haifaa Al MansourTapped As President Of International Jury At Venice Film Festival
Haifaa Al Mansour will return to Venice this year as president of the International Jury for the Luigi De Laurentiis prize for a debut film, the award that’s akin to Cannes’ Camera d’Or. Al Mansour is the first woman to ever direct a…
Last August, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Vertigo rose to the No. 1 spot on the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound survey of the so-called 50 Greatest Films Of All Time. Kim Novak, the star of that film, will be the Cannes Film Festival‘s guest of honor next month. Her presence will mark the restoration of Vertigo…
EXCLUSIVE: Dreamworks has set Nikolaj Arcel to direct Rebecca, a remake of the 1940 Alfred Hitchcock film. The picture, which has a script draft by Eastern Promises scribe Steven Knight, is being produced by Working Title partners Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner.
Arcel is coming off A Royal Affair, a film that was Oscar…
The so-called ‘Hitchcock 9’, made from 1925 to 1929, have been newly restored by the British Film Institute and are set to screen in several U.S. cities. The tour will kick off in San Francisco’s Castro Theatre as part of the Silent Film Festival June 14-16. The next stop is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts…
