Stage Door (1937)

Pamela's Nite
Rotisserie chicken, potato salad, heirloom tomato salad with homemade blueberry pie

Sparkling Dialogue: "Jean: When does your baggage get here?
Terry: I'm expecting the bulk of it in the morning.
Jean: We could leave the trunks here and sleep in the hall. There's no use crowding the trunks.
Terry: I don't know what we're going to do when the wolfhounds arrive. I hope you don't mind animals.
Jean: Oh, not at all. I've roomed with a great many of them before.
Terry: Yes, I can see that.
Jean: (after smelling Terry's ermine wrap) Fresh kill?
Terry: Yes, I trapped them myself.
Jean: Do you mind if I ask a personal question?
Terry: Another one?
Jean: Are these trunks full of bodies?
Terry: (pointing to two of the trunks) Just those, but I don't intend to unpack them.
Jean: Well, I was just thinking if the room got too crowded, we could live in the trunks.
Terry: Yes, that's a good idea. You don't mind helping me unpack. Oh, I beg your pardon, you're not the maid, are you? (Terry drapes unpacked articles of clothing over Jean's arm.)
Jean: Oh, that's quite all right. What a lovely dress! Whipped up at home by loving hands.
Terry: Every stitch.
Jean: Do you cook too?
Terry: Nothing fancy. Just plain home-cooking.
Jean: I'll bet you could boil a terrific pan of water."

Slant Magazine: Like Leo McCarey, La Cava didn't like to stick to a script, and he took his improvisational methods radically far in Stage Door. For two weeks, he had his actresses rehearse on the Footlights Club set, and he engaged a stenographer to take down what they said during breaks. This loose chat was then incorporated into the film (Arden often took the lines no one else would touch). La Cava had no use for the source material, an anti-Hollywood play by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber which preached the superiority of the legitimate theater, and so he started from scratch and used what he had: his one-of-a-kind cast.

Stage Door is the defining film about the 1930s working girl. However, the women who lounge around the Footlights Club don't do all that much working, which means that money is always tight. When snooty Linda (Gail Patrick) sweeps into the main room in the opening scene, Rogers' Jean Maitland marches in and peels the silk stockings right off her legs. "I didn't go without lunch to buy you stockings," she says, and when Linda calls her a "little hoyden" and a "guttersnipe," Jean gives her a shove. The other girls watch this catfight jubilantly, throwing out the first of an endless series of bright remarks.

As James Harvey points out in his book Romantic Comedy, it isn't what they say that is important but the way that they sound. The sound design of Stage Door and its overall aural chaos is enough to make your head spin, with overlapping dialogue that might throw even Robert Altman. It's as if these girls are terrified of silence, and if someone isn't pitching in a one-liner, another girl will laugh, sing, or simply throw out a nonsense noise. Harvey says that watching Stage Door is like "going to wisecrack heaven." Hell, it's a wisecrack symphony. And Stage Door is a truly democratic movie: every girl gets a shot at a crack, not just the stars.

Wikipedia on Ginger Rogers: Her entertainment career was born one night when the traveling Vaudeville act of Eddie Foy (Bob Hope would play Foy in The Seven Little Foys) came to Fort Worth and needed a quick stand-in. She would enter and win a Charleston contest and then hit the road on a Vaudeville tour. Her and Lela would tour for four years. During this time Lela divorced John Rogers. When Ginger was 17 she married Jack Culpepper, another dancer on the circuit. The marriage was over within months and Ginger went back to touring with her mother. When the tour got to New York City, she stayed, getting radio singing jobs and then her Broadway theater debut in a musical called Top Speed, December 25, 1929. Within two weeks of opening in Top Speed she was hired to star in Girl Crazy by George and Ira Gershwin. Fred Astaire was hired to help the dancers with their choreography, and he briefly dated Ginger. Her appearance in Girl Crazy made her an overnight star at the age of 19. In 1930 she was signed with Paramount Pictures for a seven-year contract.

Rogers would soon get herself out of the Paramount contract and head with her mother to Hollywood. When she got to California, she signed a three-picture deal with Pathé, three forgettable pictures. After getting bit parts for singing and dancing for most of 1932, in 1933 she made her screen break-through in 42nd Street with Warner Brothers. She would then make a couple more forgettable films with RKO. But in the second of those, Flying Down to Rio, she again met up with Fred Astaire.

She is most remembered as Fred Astaire's romantic interest and dancing partner in a series of ten all-singing all-dancing Hollywood musicals, but her acting career spanned over thirty years. Her first roles were in a trio of short films made in 1929 — Night in the Dormitory, A Day of a Man of Affairs, and Campus Sweethearts. In 1939, she played opposite David Niven in Bachelor Mother.

In 1941 Ginger Rogers won the Academy Award for Best Actress, for her starring role in 1940 's Kitty Foyle. In 1940 she purchased a 1000-acre ranch between Shady Cove and Eagle Point, Oregon along the Rouge River, just north of Medford. The ranch, named the 4-R's (for Rogers' Rogue River Ranch), is where she would live, along with her mother, when not doing her Hollywood business, for 50-years. The ranch was also a dairy, and would supply milk for the war effort during World War II, to Camp White. Rogers loved to fish in Rogue every summer. She sold the ranch in 1990, and moved to Medford.

She was a right-wing Republican politically, and lived for much of her life with her mother, Lela Owens McMath Rogers (1891–1977), a Christian Scientist (like Ginger) who was a newspaper reporter, scriptwriter, movie producer, one of the first women to enlist in the Marine Corps, and a founder of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Ginger's mother "named names" to the HUAC, and both mother and daughter were staunchly anti-Communist. This extremely close mother-daughter relationship -- Ginger's mother even denied Ginger's father visitation rights after their divorce -- has been proffered to explain, in part, Rogers's history of marital disappointments and childlessness.

Forgotten Master: Gregory La Cava is probably the greatest classic Hollywood director still in need of rediscovery. While for many people 1930s Hollywood means Chaplin, Hitchcock, von Sternberg, Hawks, Ford, and Lubitsch, with passing nods to Borzage and McCarey, La Cava — who created several of that decade's most enduring classics — has been unjustly forgotten, misrepresented as simply a clever studio director whose authorship even of masterpieces like Stage Door and My Man Godfrey was overshadowed by everything from the genre (screwball comedy) to the actors (strong personalities like Katharine Hepburn, William Powell, Ginger Rogers) to the writers (George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker among them). The man W. C. Fields called the best comedy mind in Hollywood — no small compliment coming from Fields — is virtually forgotten today.

Whatever headaches were created by his refusal to follow approved scripts were usually forgotten by the time production was underway. By the time the films were released to popular and critical acclaim, all was forgiven — temporarily. Much of what is worthwhile in La Cava's films can be traced to his working methods: constant rewrites, overlapping dialogue, improvisation. Actors, particularly, responded to his approach, claiming this method gave a fresh, spontaneous quality to their performances.

La Cava differentiated between intellectual actors who had difficulty being “real” — he called them “dressed-up puppets” — and “real actors” who could forget themselves and fully engage with the character they played. Andrea Leeds, who played the suicidal actress in Stage Door, was one of many who appreciated the director's approach. In Stage Door, she said, “Gregory La Cava had all of us girls in the movie come to the studio for two weeks before the shooting started and live as though we were in the lodging house itself. He rewrote scenes from day to day to get the feeling of a bunch of girls together — as spontaneous as possible. He would talk to each of us like a lifelong friend. That gave us a feeling of intimacy.” Others on the set of Stage Door said he had a secretary eavesdropping on the girls and writing down their comments, some of which he incorporated into the film. La Cava’s careful work with Katharine Hepburn on this film rescued her from the dreaded status of “box-office poison,” and Ginger Rogers, not always charitable in her comments on those she worked with, labeled him “masterful.”

Producer Pandro Berman, who worked on many of La Cava's films, talked about the chaos that existed on the director's sets. “He amazed me, and I gave him complete freedom. I went through a terrible ordeal on the picture [Stage Door], not knowing where we were going, what we were doing tomorrow, how the script would turn out. The picture aged me a hundred years every day we worked. Every single person on our boards here and in New York wanted me to fire Greg. It was pure hell!"

Katherine Hepburn: On her first outing with the Hollywood press corps after the success of A Bill of Divorcement, Hepburn talked with reporters who had invaded her and her husband's cabin aboard the ship City of Paris. A reporter asked if they were really married; Hepburn responded, "I don't remember." Following up, another reporter asked if they had any children; Hepburn's answer: "Two white and three colored."

Off-set, Hepburn, who had begun to attract significant press attention, would wear overalls and ratty tennis shoes instead of glamorous clothing fit for a starlet, prompting RKO executives to confiscate her overalls when she refused to change her wardrobe. After RKO refused to return her clothing, Hepburn followed through with her threat to walk across the studio lot in her underwear in full view of several cameras. Embarrassed, the RKO executives confiscated all the photographs and gave her back her overalls.

Elizabeth Kendall's fantastic book The Runaway Bride has more on this film and genre. Kendall's book is one of the few that successfully discusses both the making of the films from the filmmaker's immedaiate perspective and also talks about what was happening in the culture at large and how the films reflected and drove the enormious shifts in relationships between men and women that came with the depression. Sadly, the romantic comedy seems to be a truly dead form at the moment, the "romantic comedies" that are made today have as much relevance to the life we're really living as Kabuki theater.

Anyway, back to Stage Door. According to Kendall, the film went into production with an unfinished script and the assumption that either Rogers or Hepburn would end up with Adolphe Menjou. But as the shoot progressed (sounds like they shot more or less in sequence) it became clear that neither of them could have a romantic relationship with the Menjou -- and that the real story was between the women. And so the film became more or less a very modern "buddy picture."

As Stuart would say, "you couldn't get away with that today." And more's the pity.

The Dead Zone (1983)

Peter's Nite
Roast Chicken, Potatoes, Tomatos, Ice Cream, Apple Torte

Disinfo on Cronenberg: If there is a filmmaker who has accurately captured the pathological undercurrents of late 20th Century terminal life: institutionalised disaster areas, deviant sexual impulses spinning out of control and the rise of a Dark Culture, it is truly Canadian David Cronenberg.

Cronenberg established a strong following with his early theatrical films Shivers (1975), Rabid (1976) and The Brood (1979). Like Dario Argento, George A. Romero, John Carpenter and David Lynch, Cronenberg has used familiar 'visceral horror' film motifs like urban alienation and body mutation to reach art-house audiences. But he has never seen himself as a strictly horor director, and has viewed his films as highly personal meditations. Cronenberg's influence is often unacknowledged: for example, elements of his early films clearly inspired parts of Ridley Scott's Alien (1979).

It was the pre-cog mutant hero of Scanners (1980) which really signalled that Cronenberg was daring to intelligently explore realms that others left unventured. Cronenberg used 1950s pulp SF themes in a thinly veiled allegory hinting at the Thalidomide tragedies and contemporary pharmaceutical experimentation. Videodrome (1981) upped oft-quoted Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan's media theories by literally exploring the New Flesh. Panned on release, Videodrome presciently captured the underground interest in body scarification/modification and pirate cable TV long before cyberculture became fashionable, and is regularly cited by film aficionados. Its mediation on the body/technology dichotomy hinted at coming 'meatspace' flashpoints like Heaven's Gate.

Much of Cronenberg's 1980s output occupied the twilight-zone between art-house auteur and mainstream cross-over. His version of Stephen King's Dead Zone (1983) re-shaped a rambling story into a Reagan-era apocalyptic mindscape, while The Fly (1986) foreshadowed the Human Genome Project in its controversial depiction of human sexuality. Dead Ringers (1988) is regarded by many as Cronenberg's finest project to date: a subtle and unsettling psychological exploration of cojoint twins and identity swapping. For Night Breed (1990), Cronenberg teamed up with acclaimed horror author Clive Barker to explore a society of shape-shifting misfits. The ironic twist was that Barker wrote and directed the film, and Cronenberg starred as the nefarious Dr. Philip Decker.

Controversy surrounds Cronenberg's adaption of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1991), as Cronenberg mixed biographical elements with an exploration of Interzone. Some purists felt that the film was confusing, and that the original cut-up novel was unfilmable. However others felt that Cronenberg was the best director for the job. M. Butterfly (1993) and Blood and Donuts (1995) both received mixed reviews, as some critics felt that Cronenberg was trying too hard to achieve mainstream success.

But no reservations could be made about Crash (1996), a stunning adaption of J.G. Ballard's controversial 1973 novel that explored auto-crash fetishes, deviant sexuality and the rise of the automobile as an arbiter of the contemporary psyche. New Line Cinema owner Ted Turner found the film so controversial that he shelved it for months. After dominating the Cannes Film Festival (where it was awarded the Special Jury Prize), Crash received strong worldwide reviews and pro-active support from Ballard.

With eXistenZ (1999), Cronenberg returned to writing and directing, creating an unusual exploration of bio-engineered video-games that was decidedly different from The Matrix (1999) and other virtual reality thrillers. The pro-life extremists became suddenly very real during the video-game/violence debates after the Littleton and Columbine shootings.

Having established himself as a formidable force, David Cronenberg continues an independent course into the twilight visions of his own atavistic primal mindscape.

Controlling the audience: Even Hitchcock liked to think of himself as a puppeteer who was manipulating the strings of his audience and making them jump. He liked to think he had that kind of control. I don't think that kind of control is possible beyond a very obvious kind of physical twitch when something jumps out of the corner of a frame. I also think the relationship I have with my audience is a lot more complex than what Hitchcock seemed to want his to be -- although I think he had more going on under the surface as well.

But you can't control all of that. Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to. I'm often surprised -- I expect to be surprised -- by my audience's reactions to things.

Adaptation: Asked if it requires extra effort to leave his own imprint on an adaptation rather than an original script, Cronenberg says, "I know that it's going to be my film, because I'm going to be making 2,000 decisions a day while we're making it, and no one else would make those same 2,000 decisions. I will mix my blood with it, and it'll be enough to satisfy me."

On Storyboarding: I never storyboard, there's not that kind of intentionality. It's not a religious thing with me, but I really have disdain for storyboards. I know that because of Hitchcock and his own mythology, which was a lie and a product of his egomania--and I haven't seen Road to Perdition but I understand Sam Mendes, it's only his second movie and he storyboarded each of his scenes...

But that cuts out the acting, you know, it cuts out a lot of collaborators. I don't want to set it up so this scene has to be set up against the window and the rain, because what if the actor has a great idea for a movement away from the window to the piano? You lock that possibility out when you storyboard and I never want to shackle myself that way. I want to feel it--to move the actors around the room and look at it. Having said that, I do send Peter and Howard and my editor Ron Sanders and [production designer] Andrew Sanders, those are the first people I send a script to and I do it really early on when I'm seriously thinking that it's a movie I want to do, because I want them to start thinking about it even when they're all over the world doing other things. I want them to think about the casting, even. Peter and I, we both work very intuitively. We often talk about coming up with a look, but basically we just start.

Horror as a freeing genre: Yes, in a way, you're protected by the genre, because people's expectations are different. Their understanding and approach to what they're watching is quite different when they know they're watching a horror or sci-fi film. Material that would be very difficult to do -- to finance and get an audience for -- if it were just a mainstream, straight, realistic drama is very doable within the protective confines of horror. And I use The Fly, your favorite film [Laughs.], as an example. If you look at it just as a drama, it's about two very attractive, eccentric people who meet and fall in love. One of them contracts a hideous wasting disease and his lover watches helplessly until she helps him commit suicide. That's basically the plot of The Fly when it's stripped of its horror/sci-fi elements. That's a very tough sell! It would be a very hard movie to watch, emotionally and so on, but because of the other things that are going on in it, you can tell that story with all the emotion you want, but it's still somehow absorbable. There's a sort of distancing effect. There's a fantasy element. And it's always very interesting to me that people who love The Fly, often, it's because of the love story and not because of the mechanics of it. It obviously touches people, but it's bearable. That would be a very tough story to sell in a realistic way. So, within a genre, you can experiment with fantasy, reality and emotion in a way that perhaps would be difficult or impossible to do outside the genre.


Cronenberg on Religion: Q: Most of your films deal with various characters' personal spirituality, yet you have never dealt directly with religion.

Cronenberg: The reason why is that I'm not interested. You're absolutely right. For me, it's not even worth discussion. It doesn't interest me. It interests me only to be discarded. If I start there, I'm mired in a discussion that is very unfruitful to me. I'm simply a non-believer and have been forever. To discuss religion is to put me in a debate with myself. I'm interested in saying, "Let us discuss the existential question. We are all going to die, that is the end of all consciousness. There is no afterlife. There is no God. Now what do we do." That's the point where it starts getting interesting to me. If I have to go back and say, "What if there is a God?" then I'm doing a debate that is not very interesting. You have to create one character who believes and another that doesn't. It's not an issue.

Q. How were you raised?

Cronenberg: I'm an atheist and my parents were both atheists so it was never a big issue, and if I wanted to become an Orthodox Jew, it was never, "You must not do that." And I certainly went through all those things as a kid wondering about the existence of God or not, but at a very early age, I decided we made it up because we were afraid and it was one way to make things palatable.

Stephen King bio: Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947, the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. After his parents separated when Stephen was a toddler, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good. Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of the elderly couple. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support. After Stephen's grandparents passed away, Mrs. King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the mentally challenged.

Stephen attended the grammar school in Durham and then Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at Orono, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, THE MAINE CAMPUS. He was also active in student politics, serving as a member of the Student Senate. He came to support the anti-war movement on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional. He graduated from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level. A draft board examination immediately post-graduation found him 4-F on grounds of high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums.

He and Tabitha Spruce married in January of 1971. He met Tabitha in the stacks of the Fogler Library at the University of Maine at Orono, where they both worked as students. As Stephen was unable to find placement as a teacher immediately, the Kings lived on his earnings as a laborer at an industrial laundry, and her student loan and savings, with an occasional boost from a short story sale to men's magazines.

Stephen made his first professional short story sale ("The Glass Floor") to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. Throughout the early years of his marriage, he continued to sell stories to men's magazines. Many of these were later gathered into the Night Shift collection or appeared in other anthologies.

In the fall of 1971, Stephen began teaching high school English classes at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels.

In the spring of 1973, Doubleday accepted the novel Carrie for publication. On Mother's Day of that year, Stephen learned from his new editor at Doubleday, Bill Thompson, that a major paperback sale would provide him with the means to leave teaching and write full-time.
At the end of the summer of 1973, the Kings moved their growing family to southern Maine because of Stephen's mother's failing health. Renting a summer home on Sebago Lake in North Windham for the winter, Stephen wrote his next-published novel, originally titled Second Coming and then Jerusalem's Lot, before it became 'Salem's Lot, in a small room in the garage. During this period, Stephen's mother died of cancer, at the age of 59.

Carrie was published in the spring of 1974. That same fall, the Kings left Maine for Boulder, Colorado. They lived there for a little less than a year, during which Stephen wrote The Shining, set in Colorado. Returning to Maine in the summer of 1975, the Kings purchased a home in the Lakes Region of western Maine. At that house, Stephen finished writing The Stand, much of which also is set in Boulder. The Dead Zone was also written in Bridgton.

King on self-doubt: I had a period where I thought I might not be good enough to publish. I started to sell short fiction to men's magazines while I was in college. I got married six or seven months after graduating, and for two years I sold maybe six stories a year, and I had the money I was making teaching, too, and it was a decent income. And then I sort of got out of the Zone. And for a year or so, I couldn't sell anything, and I was drinking a lot, wasn't drugging, couldn't afford it, and I was writing mostly shit, and then Carrie came along and I was OK again. But during that one year, I just thought I'm going to be a high school teacher, and nothing's ever going to happen to me.

Christopher Walken bio: Born Ronald Walken in 1943 in Queens, New York, he studied dancing originally, and his early career included such odd jobs as lion taming. He was influenced to embark on a career in show business by Jerry Lewis. The young Walken was an extra on a show where Lewis and Martin were guest hosts. His early work was almost exclusively on the small screen in TV shows such as "Naked City" (credited as Ronnie Walken), "Hawaii Five-O" and "Kojak".

He made his big screen debut in the 1968 film "Me and My Brother". Other roles in various minor films followed, but it was not until his role as Diane Keaton's slightly psychotic brother in "Annie Hall" (1977) that people really began to pay attention. Although his part was little more than a cameo, his memorable speech to Woody Allen about how he sometimes feels like driving head on into the lights of an oncoming car provided the template for many of Walken's subsequent roles - scary and humorous combined. Walken is also famous for a role he did not get that same year - he was George Lucas's second choice for the role of Han Solo after Harrison Ford. This was memorably spoofed on a "Saturday Night Live" episode years later, where Kevin Spacey played Walken auditioning for the role with his infamous delivery style.

1983 was an important year for Walken as it saw him in two leading man roles where he played somewhat against type for a change. The first of these, "Brainstorm", was a sci-fi thriller about scientists who experiment with recording people's thoughts and was directed by Douglas Trumbull, the special effects genius behind "2001: A Space Odyssey". However, it is mainly notorious for being the last film to star Natalie Wood, who died before principal photography was completed in 1981. She was on a sailing trip with her husband, Robert Wagner, and Walken himself when she drowned. The mysterious nature of her death, and the need to shoot further scenes without her, delayed the release of the film by two years. When it finally did reach movie theaters, the reaction was less than ecstatic.

Walken's other film that year, "The Dead Zone", was far more successful. A fairly faithful adaptation of the novel by Stephen King, it featured Walken in a rare heroic role as schoolteacher Johnny Smith, who receives the gift (or curse) of foresight after awaking from a long coma. Walken's haunted, sensitive performance was a revelation, and made the story possibly even more emotionally powerful than it had been in the novel. The heartfelt character development in the film was also a departure for director David Cronenberg after the extreme nature of his early horror films. One amusing coincidence: early on in the film Walken tells his class he'll be reading them The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Of course, 16 years later, Walken played the legendary horseman himself.

More Cow Bell: During a popular Saturday Night Live sketch [1], Christopher Walken played "famous" music producer Bruce Dickinson (not to be confused with the Iron Maiden vocalist), insisting that "more cowbell" is the key to making Blue Öyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" a success: "Guess what? I got a fever. And the only prescription... is more cowbell!" This 2000 SNL skit ends with the words on screen: "In Memorium: Gene Frenkle: 1950-2000". (Frenkle, played by Will Ferrell, was the mythical band member who played cowbell on the track.) The skit may have been influenced by a 1976 SNL moment when Chevy Chase in a long scarf substituted for an absent Mick Jagger by playing the cowbell on musical guest Carly Simon's "You're So Vain."

Walken Interview: Q: One of the things that's distinctive about your work is that the words often come out in a surprising way. Are you surprised too, as you speak them?

A: Yes. One of an actor's most valuable qualities is the ability to surprise the audience, and I'm convinced that in order to do that you have to be able to do it to yourself.

Q: How did you approach 'The Dead Zone'?

In that part I felt really natural, really. I behaved and looked and spoke pretty much like myself. The only thing that wasn't like me was his situation. In a case like that I have to just say to myself, what would it be like if this was your life?

Q: You've played quite a few characters who are traumatized. Is that sense of trauma hard to work for?

A; No. I have a natural kind of foreignness-very hard for me to play a regular guy. There always seems to be something peculiar about him. And I think that has to do less with me-as a person I'm very conservative and predictable: I've been married for 25 years, I pay my bills, I have a very conservative, disciplined life. But whatever quality that is the reason that I am offered jobs, I think that has to do with the fact that I grew up in show business. I was a child performer with my brothers-I wouldn't say "actor," I'm still not sure I can call myself an actor, but I am a performer and I have been since I was 3 years old, one way or another. My brothers and I were models when we were babies. I did musicals until I was 25. I went to a school for professional children, all the people I knew were in show business, I simply grew up in show business in the Fifties in New York when television was born and it was all live, 90 television shows coming out of New York every week, live-Dramas, everything. Howdy Doody.

The Boston Strangler (1968)

Nora's Nite
Fusilli pasta with homemade meat sauce, Lemon Torte, Ice Cream

Roger Ebert writing in 1968: The problem here is that real events are being offered as entertainment. A strangler murdered 13 women and now we are asked to take our dates to the Saturday night flick to see why. Gerold Frank's original book was written with the most honorable intentions, I believe, but the movie is something else: A deliberate exploitation of the tragedy of Albert DeSalvo and his victims.

That the killings are being exploited there can be little doubt. Although the film's treatment of the murders is restrained and intelligent, it is being promoted in singularly bad taste. Outside the theater there's a door that flaps open and shut, while lurid photographs of the strangler's victims rotate inside.

What sort of person is attracted by this approach? I can't forget two young girls sitting near me in the theater. Near the film's end, Tony Curtis (as DeSalvo) has a long and difficult scene in which he pantomimes one of the murders. It is compelling, brutal and tragic. And these girls were laughing. They were having the times of their lives. My God. When you see something like this it forces you to rethink your whole approach to the movie.

It will be argued that the film is beneficial and even educational. I am not sure. We are told that Albert DeSalvo literally had a split personality: That most of the time he was a family man, absolutely unaware of his other identity as the strangler. Then what do we learn?

DeSalvo seems to have been one man in a million, a man with a rare psychological and medical history which made him, in a sense, irresponsible for his crimes. What do we learn, except that he was sick? Is our insight into crime -- and the social causes for it -- increased? Hardly. From this point of view, "In Cold Blood" was the worthier film because it dealt with conditions that could have been changed, lives that might have been saved.

If "The Boston Strangler" is not a public service -- all these "true" crime movies are publicized as noble and responsible undertakings -- then why should we praise it? It serves three other functions: as art, as entertainment and as a commercial venture. As entertainment, it's first-rate. Henry Fonda is a subtle, sensitive lawyer; George Kennedy makes a convincing cop, and Tony Curtis acts better than he has in a decade. There are some fascinating scenes of police work, some dirty words, some sex, some laughs, some suspense and a chase.

Richard Fleischer: The son of famed animator Max Fleischer (Popeye, Betty Boop et. al.), Richard O. Fleischer was a psychology student at Brown University when he dropped out in favor of the Yale Drama Department. At age 21, Fleischer organized a campus theatrical troupe called the Arena Players. In 1942, he went to work for RKO-Pathe in New York, editing the company's weekly newsreels before producing and directing his own short-subject projects, including the March of Time-like This is America and a series of gagged-up silent-film vignettes titled Flicker Flashbacks. In 1946, he headed to Hollywood, there to direct feature films for Pathe's parent studio, RKO Radio; his last short-subject effort was the Oscar-winning Design for Death (1948). At first limited to "B" pictures, Fleischer gained a loyal critical following with such topnotch films as Follow Me Quietly (1949) and The Narrow Margin (1952).

Perhaps sensing that RKO was on its last legs, Fleischer moved on to MGM, then to Walt Disney Studios.

While working for Disney he helmed his first big-budgeter, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954). Firmly established as an action specialist, Fleischer remained in this vein with such profitable projects as The Vikings (1958), These Thousand Hills (1959) and Fantastic Voyage (1966). He also evinced a fondness for crime and suspense pictures, notably Violent Saturday (1955), Compulsion (1959) and The Boston Strangler (1968). While many of his films were box-office bonanzas, he also turned out an equal number of unsuccessful films including Dr. Doolittle (1967) and Che! (1969).

A true survivor, Fleischer was able to remain active until the late 1980s, by which time he'd chalked up fewer and fewer hits like The New Centurions (1972) and more and more misses like The Jazz Singer (1980) and Million Dollar Mystery (1987). Though he hasn't made a film since 1990, Richard Fleischer has kept busy as the licensee of his dad's cartoon creation Betty Boop; and in 1994, Fleischer published his sprightly autobiography, Just Tell Me When to Cry. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Edward Anhalt: Born in New York City. After working as a journalist and documentary filmmaker for Pathé and CBS-TV, teamed with his wife Edna Anhalt (née Richards) during WW II to write pulp fiction. After the war, they graduated to writing screenplays for thrillers, beginning with BULLDOG DRUMMOND STRIKES BACK (1947). Anhalt proved himself a versatile, consistently effective (and reputedly speedy) scenarist, superb at contemporary urban thrillers (PANIC IN THE STREETS, 1950), war dramas (THE YOUNG LIONS, 1958), historical epics (BECKET, 1964) and much of everything in between, such as THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING (1952, also assoc. producer), NOT AS A STRANGER (1955) and THE PRIDE AND THE PASSION (1957).

On his own (or in collaboration with writers other than his wife), some of his non-nominated credits include GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! (1962), WIVES AND LOVERS (1963), BOEING BOEING (1965), THE BOSTON STRANGLER (1968), THE MADWOMAN OF CHAILLOT (1969), JEREMIAH JOHNSON (1972), "QB VII" (TV mini-series, 1974), THE MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH (1975), LUTHER (1976), GREEN ICE (1981) and THE HOLCROFT COVENANT (1985). During the last years of his career, he worked mainly for television series and made-for-TV movies.

* Writing (Motion Picture Story) 1950: PANIC IN THE STREETS (w. Edna Anhalt)
Nominated for Writing (Motion Picture Story) 1952: THE SNIPER (w. Edna Anhalt)
* Writing (Best Screenplay based on material from another medium) 1964: BECKET

3 nominations, 2 Awards

Was DeSalvo the Strangler? Even though nobody has ever officially been on trial as the Boston Strangler, the public believed that Albert DeSalvo, who confessed in detail to each of the eleven "official" Strangler murders, as well as two others, was the murderer. However, at the time that DeSalvo confessed, most people who knew him personally did not believe him capable of the vicious crimes and today there is a persuasive case to be made that DeSalvo wasn't the killer after all.

CBS News on DeSalvo: Over an 18-month period from 1962 to 1964, the city of Boston was terrorized by a serial killer, the infamous "Boston Strangler." But in 1964, Albert DeSalvo confessed to the brutal killings of 13 women, and authorities and the city at large breathed a collective sigh of relief, believing the killer was finally behind bars.

When he confessed, DeSalvo was a patient in a mental hospital, and his confession could not be used against him. With no evidence linking him to any of the 13 murders, DeSalvo was convicted of unrelated crimes and was sentenced to life in prison.

Now, 36 years later, 48 Hours reports that some investigators, as well as the family of one victim, are not sure that DeSalvo was the killer. They believe DeSalvo lied in his confession, and they want to force the state to open the case.

Diane Dodd, the sister of victim Mary Sullivan, says her instincts told her someone got away with murder. Now she and Albert DeSalvo's brother Richard are pushing the state to reopen the long dormant case.

They have many allies. Susan Kelly, author of The Boston Stranglers, believes DeSalvo fabricated the entire story. She concedes that his confession was accurate on many details but adds, "the newspapers were an excellent source of information - and it's very interesting to me that the details that Albert got wrong in his confession were identical to the details that the newspapers got wrong."

Kelly thinks several different perpetrators committed the murders.

Robert Ressler, a criminologist and former profiler for the FBI, also believes that it is unlikely that one person is responsible for all the Strangler murders. "You're putting together so many different patterns here that its inconceivable behaviorally that all these could fit one individual," says Ressler.

Despite the theories, without new evidence there is little chance the investigation will lead to answers. To gather that evidence, Dodd agreed to have her sister's body exhumed and re-examined. "This is the last resort. maybe there is something," says Dodd.

Forensics expert James Starrs led the team of independent scientists tha performed the second autopsy on Sullivan.

Although the body had deteriorated, they were able to extract several pieces of evidence that may lead to a positive identification of the killer. "The most promising evidence is a head hair from the pubic region," says Starrs. "We do not expect to find head hairs in the pubic region."

Starrs' autopsy also turned up something that may refute DeSalvo's statement that he strangled Mary Sullivan with his bare hands. Starrs found that the hyoid bone in Sullivan's neck was not broken. According to Starrs, that bone would likely have broken if Sullivan had been strangled by hand.

Attorneys Dan Sharp and Elaine Whitfield are helping the families sue the government on the grounds that biological evidence taken is personal property. The State of Massachusetts recently announced that it did find new evidence and will test it. So far the state has refused to share this new evidence, but the families want to be present when the testing is done.

Dodd hopes the newfound evidence can lead to an answer to 36 years of wondering. But she also knows she faces an uphill battle. If it never goes anywhere I'm going to be able to say at least I tried."

Boston Strangler FBI files: DeSalvo was the subject of an FBI unlawful flight to avoid confinement investigation when he escaped from a Massachusetts state mental hospital on February 24, 1967. DeSalvo was being held at the hospital pending appeal of a life sentence for numerous rapes. Local authorities apprehended DeSalvo in Lynn, Massachusetts, the following day. Files contain background information on DeSalvo. A 1961 memo documents an arrest when Desalvo was know as the "Tapester." At that time he was accused of posing as a talent scout for a modeling agency. He would ring door bells looking for young women who he would offer a modeling job, if they passed a measuring test.