Birthdays: Georgio Vasari, Henry Ford, Emily Bronte', Casey Stengel, Roy Williams, Vladimir Zworykin, Arnold Schwarzenegger is 73, Ed "Kookie" Byrnes, Peter Bogdanovich is 81, Delta Burke, Henry Moore, Anita Hill, Lawrence Fishburne is 59, Jean Reno is 71, Hilary Swank is 46, Christopher Nolan, Lisa Kudrow is 57
1889- Start of the Sherlock Holmes mystery, the Naval Treaty.
1929 -The Hollywood Bowl musicians go on strike.
1932-Walt Disney’s “Flowers and Trees” the first Technicolor Cartoon. Disney had worked out a deal with Technicolor creator Herbert Kalmus to use his technique exclusively for two years to show larger Hollywood studios its quality.
1932- The first Los Angeles hosting of the Olympic Games in their spanking new Coliseum. Gold medalist in swimming Larry Buster Crabbe later became a movie star. Another medalist, the Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku, began to teach the Californians about a new sport- surfing!
1935- The first paperback book. Andre Maurois 'Ariel, a Life of Shelley', published in this new form by Penguin Books of London
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1936- Producer David O. Selznick buys the movie rights to the best selling book “Gone With The Wind” from an ailing Irving Thalberg. The "boy genius" Thalberg was hoping that Selznick would ruin himself in the process of making this film. Thalberg was convinced that GWTW would prove to be a massive flop because "Costume dramas are box office poison."
1948 - Professional wrestling premieres on prime-time network TV (DuMont)
1954 - Elvis Presley joins Local 71, the Memphis Federation of Musicians.
1959- Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor patented the integrated circuit.
1986- Walt Disney released “Flight of the Navigator”, featuring early photo-real CG VFX done by Canadian studio Omnibus.
1999- The Blair Witch Project opened in theaters. The low-budget indy became a monster hit due to an early on-line campaign claiming the footage was genuine.
If I could set the record straight: Selznick didn't buy GWTW from Thalberg. Thalberg did pass on it but mainly because his plate was already full and he had neither the time nor the energy to devote what he correctly saw was a gargantuan project. He certainly didn't hope Selznick would ruin himself. Thalberg wasn't like that, and while he and Selznick had their run-ins, they also had a very health respect for each other's work. And had Thalberg not died so young, he most likely would have followed Selznick's lead and left MGM to start his own studio. (I've just published a novel about Irving Thalberg called "The Heart of the Lion" so I've done a fair bit of reading about him.)
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