Birthdays: King Henry IV of England (1361), Washington
Irving, William Marcy "Boss"
Tweed, Sally Rand the Fan Dancer,
Ma Rainey, Iron Eyes Cody, Wayne Newton, Doris Day, Robert Sherwood, Virgil
Grissom, Marsha Mason, Melissa Etheridge, Marlon Brando, Amanda Byrnes, David
Hyde Pierce, Alec Baldwin is 60, Eddie Murphy is 57
1897-composer Johannes Brahms died.
1920- Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald got married.
FIFTY YEARS AGO 1968- Stanley Kubrick's epic film "2001:
A Space Odyssey" premiered. The N.Y. Times review said it was: "
Somewhere between hypnotic and boring". Pauline Kael called it
"monumentally unimaginative!" Writer Arthur C. Clarke always said HAL
the computer was not a coded reference to IBM. At the Oscars, Clarke and
Kubrick lost the best screenplay award to Mel Brooks for the Producers. 2001
won only one Oscar, for visual effects. It was the only Oscar a Stanley Kubrick
film ever won.
1973- Standing on the corner of 6th Ave in
Manhattan, Motorola scientist Marty Cooper made the first cell phone call. He
called his competitor Joel Engel at Bell Labs to tell him he had lost the race
to invent the cell phone. He said that first phone, “It was the size of a leg
of lamb.”
1994-Disney chief executive Frank Wells was killed in a
helicopter crash on a skiing trip. It’s been speculated that blowing snow off
some high peaks caused an ice ball to be sucked into the copter’s air intake
manifold. Clint Eastwood was supposed to be on that trip but couldn't make it.
Billie Joel and Christie Brinkley had a similar scare with their helicopter on
the same day. The death of the Disney CEO set in motion the events that would
lead to Jeffrey Katzenberg leaving Disney and forming Dreamworks, as well as
Michael Ovitz’s brief tenure as a mouseketeer and Michael Eisner’s eventual
fall in 2006. In 1999 the Hollywood Reporter estimated that the little iceball
cost the Walt Disney Company over one billion dollars.
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