As one YouTube user so eloquently puts it: “Ingrid Pitt, you can bite my neck with pleasure.” The Polish actress and star of films like The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula, died on 23 November, just two days after celebrating her 73rd birthday. Sadly, it turns out that all the fake blood she imbibed over …
In considering the passing of Arthur Penn last Tuesday, it embarrasses me to admit how little credit I gave him at one time. It was the mid-70s, I was a young, arrogant, know-it-all film student at the University of South Carolina. Like so many of us who had newly-found serious study in film, I pontificated …
He shared a bath with Laurence Olivier (Spartacus), a bed with Janet Leigh (the first of his six wives) and was one half of a flamboyant 70s crime-fighting duo with Roger Moore in The Persuaders. But despite his luxuriant locks and matinée idol looks, Tony Curtis, is best remembered for embracing his feminine side as …
“The producer is like the conductor of an orchestra. Maybe he can’t play every instrument, but he knows what every instrument should sound like.” Zanuck The producer can be an enigmatic presence in the film making process. It is a role that is hard to define and thus, rarely recognised with the same reverence as …
Film School Rejects recently posted a list of the best — and worst — movie collaborations between directors and their spouses. It seems those capricious movie gods have decreed that for every Oscar-winning gem like Fargo (Joel Coen directs Frances McDormand) there must be a farrago like Guy Ritchie’s Swept Away, starring his then-wife Madonna. …
Throughout history, standing to the right of every great king one usually finds a great prime minister turning the king’s vision from abstract ambition into fact. During critical years for Roger Corman’s Concorde studio, the man at Corman’s elbow was Mike Elliott. Look up Mike Elliott on the Internet Movie Data Base (www.imdb.com) and you’ll …
If Roger Corman was the commander-in-chief, and Mike Elliott his field marshal, than Travis Rink was among the front line troops who actually had to carry the fight. Writing several scripts for Concorde in the early 1990s, Rink had a close-up look at the factory-like process which made Concorde’s prodigious output possible. Rink had made …
She could have been Mrs Robinson in The Graduate; she did play (once) the all-American mama Olivia Walton; and for 30 years she was the real-life Mrs Roald Dahl. For me, though, Patricia Neal will always be plain old Alma Brown, the world-weary housekeeper who refused to become another notch on the bedpost of Paul …