Birthdays: Andrew Jackson, Lee Schubert-one of Broadways Shubert Brothers, Ry Cooder, Sly Stone, Harry James, Lightnin' Hopkins, Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, Judd Hirsch, Norm Van Brocklin, Sabu, Fabio, Reni Harlin, David Cronenburg is 80, Eva Longoria is 48, David Silverman
1909- Harry Gordon Selfridge, formerly manager of Chicago’s Marshal Fields, opened Selfridges, London’s first Department Store. Selfridge invented the Bargain Basement, the Annual Sale, and coined the motto “ The Customer is Always Right.”
1913- President Woodrow Wilson held the first presidential news conference.
1915- Universal Studios formed. Carl Laemmele bought a huge track of Burbank farmland and set up his studio. Laemmele had wooden bleachers built next to the movie sets where he charged people a nickel to come watch the filming. He used so many of his relatives in production that poet Ogden Nash quipped: "Carl Laemmele has a very large Faemmele." Universal actually had been operating as a film company since 1912 but the company counts today as its birthday.
1933- Young animator Chuck Jones first hired at Leon Schlesinger’s Looney Tunes cartoon studio. He was made a director in 1938.
1941- The daughter of Cecil B. DeMille, Katherine DeMille, had married actor Anthony Quinn. This day tragedy struck the family. On a visit to Cecil B.’s estate, the couple’s three year old son Christopher wandered off into neighbor W.C. Fields’ yard where he fell into his unsupervised swimming pool and drowned. The parents were so shattered they divorced afterward. Anthony Quinn refused to talk about the rest of his long life. Fields was so depressed he had the pool filled in and landscaped so no reminder of the tragedy would remain.
1944- The DeHAVILAND CASE- A judge ruled actress Olivia DeHaviland free of her exclusive seven year personal contract to Warner Bros. For years movie stars like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck and James Cagney had been fighting in court the system of exclusive contracts the studios used to keep them under control. They had no choice in the type of films they did, no residuals, and studios could lend them out to other studios for higher fees, and keep the money.
If the actor complained they were put on disciplinary leave by the studio, without pay, and the penalty time tagged onto the end of their contract. Garbo called it the closest thing to slavery. Some contracts even ordered some stars not to get married for fear it would erode their sex appeal. The DeHaviland Case broke that system and allowed actors to make their own deals. Olivia DeHaviland died in 2020 at age 104.
1956- Lerner & Lowe’s musical "My Fair Lady" premiered.
1956- The film Forbidden Planet premiered in theaters. Considered the granddaddy of Sci-Fiction blockbusters A lot of the films effects were done by freelancing Disney effects animators like Joshua Meador.
1962- The discovery of anti-matter.
1964- Elizabeth Taylor married Richard Burton, for the first time.
1964- The book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Freidan first published. The first major book to point out women were unhappy with their second class roles. And it coined the term Feminist.
1969- Two young heirs to the Polydent false Teeth Company and two hippy promoters announced a rock festival would be held that summer in the farm community of Woodstock New York.
1977- Television sitcom Threes Company debuted.
1979- Strange lights danced in the night skies over Phoenix Arizona from 8:30 pm until 11:00 pm. The military dismissed them as experimental flares but the duration and patterns seemed unusually long for mere flares. Was it a UFO light show?
1985- Symbolic.com is assigned the first registered private domain site on the Internet.
2002- Blue Sky’s hit animated film Ice Age premiered. The studio was being scaled down to be actioned off when the film was a massive hit. Out doing the Best Picture Oscar winner A Beautiful Mind.
2004- Cal Tech Scientists announce the discovery of Planet Xenia, the tenth planet orbiting our Sun, beyond Pluto. Some want to call it Sedna, an Inuit goddess who lived under the ice.
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