Birthdays St. Francis Xavier, William Wordsworth, Mongo
Santamaria, Walter Winchell, David Frost, Percy Faith, Daniel Ellsberg, Jerry
Brown, Alan Pakula, Billie Holiday, Ravi Shankar, Irene Castle, Wayne Rogers,
Stan Winston, James Garner, Olkirk Christenson-the inventor of Lego toys, Francis
Ford Coppola is 79, Russell Crowe is 54, Jacky Chan is 64
1891- Showman P.T. Barnum died of old age. The last words of
the man who invented kiddie matinees, the Greatest Show on Earth and coined the
word “Jumbo” were "How were the box office receipts today?"
1927- An audience at the Bell Laboratory watched a three
inch television screen broadcast a sound image of US Secretary of Commerce
Herbert Hoover.
1927- Abel Gance’s classic film Napoleon premiered at the
Paris Opera. Gances active camera and wild editing were years ahead of their
time, climaxed by a triptych of large images on three movie screens linked by
synchronized projectors. One American man in the audience, Walter Wallin, was
inspired to develop the Panavision wide screen lens, used in many modern movies.
1933- Hitler's regime passed the Professional Civil Service
Restoration Act, which ordered Jews and other political undesirables fired from
all government posts including university professorships, museum curators, and arts funded grants. The
exile of Germany's intellectual elite began- Bertholdt Brecht, Billy Wilder,
George Gropius, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, George Grosz, Michael Curtiz, Lazslo
Moholy-Nagy, Max Reinhardt and Otto Klemperer -Colonel Klink's dad.
1939-"The Ugly Duckling" the last Disney Silly
Symphony short cartoon.
1945-The SUICIDE MISSION OF THE BATTLESHIP YAMATO- The
Japanese superbattleship had just enough fuel to sail into the midst of the
American Navy around Okinawa, then it was to sell itself dearly. It never made
it though. Because of Ultra, the cracking of the Japanese code, the Americans
knew it was coming. The Yamato was bombed and torpedoed by swarms of U.S. planes
and went to the bottom before it ever got within range of other surface ships. Later the Yamato had a second career as the star of a kids anime series.
1949- Musical "South Pacific" debuts. Some
Enchanted Evening…
1970- The film Midnight Cowboy with Dustin Hoffman and John
Voight won the Best Picture Oscar. The only x-rated film ever to do so.
Disney’s It’s Tough to be a Bird” won best animated short.
1990- The Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center opened a show
of the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe that the Corcoran Gallery in
Washington DC cancelled. Mapplethorpe’s explicit depictions of gay and s/m
lifestyles shocked neoconservative critics of the national endowments for the
arts. A media debate on whether government should subsidize or censor art
raged, and Dennis Barry the museum director was tried for obscenity. His
acquittal was seen as a victory for free expression but the argument cast a
pall on future funding of controversial art.
1998- Pop star George Michael was busted after exposing
himself to an undercover policeman in a public park men’s room in Beverly
Hills.
20 Years Ago 1998- Lead singer for the punk band The Plasmatics,
Wendy O. Williams, committed suicide with a shotgun. The outrageously mohawked
punk rocker was known for stunts on stage like destroying her amplifiers with a
chainsaw, skydiving in the nude, autoeroticism with a sledgehammer, and
crashing a burning school bus into a wall of television sets.
2155- According to the show Babylon 5 today marked the first
contact between humans and the Centauri Alliance.
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