Birthdays: Louis XIV the Sun King, Jesse James, Cardinal Richelieu, Johann Christian Bach, Jacopo Meyerbeer, John Cage, Quentin de la Tour, Darryl F. Zanuck, Jack Valenti, George Lazenby, Freddy Mercury, Raquel Welch, Kathy Guisewhite, Dweezil Zappa, Werner Herzog is 82, Michael Keaton is 72, Rose McGowan is 51, Bob Newhart is 95
1921- FATTY ARBUCKLE. After completing three feature films simultaneously, comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle rented three rooms in San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel for a big party. One attendee, Actress Virginia Rappe, died of peritonitis a few days afterward. Maude Delmont, a professional blackmailer who also attended, spread the story that Arbuckle had raped the actress with a champagne bottle. She never testified in court. The Hearst Press took up the story and sensationalized it as an example of Hollywood depravity. Fatty Arbuckle was found innocent after three high profile trials (the last jury actually apologized to him). The Motion Picture Production Code was formed as a direct result. Its first action was to ban Arbuckle from the screen. Fatty Arbuckle directed comedy for ten years under the pseudonym Will B. Good, and appeared in a successful series of short sound films in 1932, but died the same day that Warner Brothers signed him for a feature.
1927- Walt Disney’s Trolley Troubles, the first Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Walt losing the rights to this character a year later caused him to design Mickey Mouse.
1932- Paul Bern, the studio executive husband of sexy starlet Jean Harlow, was found lying naked on his bathroom floor with a bullet in his head. Bern’s brother revealed that Paul Bern had another wife in NY named Dorothy Millette he was hiding. She came to Hollywood while Harlow was away doing a film. Supposedly during an angry confrontation between Millette and Paul Bern he was shot. The studio was notified before the police. MGM heads Irving Thalberg and Louie B. Mayer jumped to hush up the scandal. Today the accepted version is he committed suicide.
1935- Tumbling Tumbleweeds premiered, the film that made a star out of Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy.
1943- Young British cartoonist Ronald Searle was captured by the Japanese in Burma. He spent his time as a P.O.W. working on the infamous Bridge on the River Kwai and making sketches of the nightmarish conditions of his fellow prisoners.
1957- Jacques Kerouac’s ode to the beat life ON THE ROAD, first published. Kerouac wrote it in a heat using one large roll of white paper stuffed into his typewriter instead of individual sheets. When the editor got the novel it had no paragraph breaks of chapter breaks. Another young writer of the time, Truman Capote, was unimpressed. “That’s not writing, it’s typing.”
1958- The novel DR ZHIVAGO by Boris Pasternak published in US. It was banned in Russia until the collapse of Communism.
1964- Cook Teressa Bellissimo of the Anchor Bar in Buffalo NY, took some left over chicken wings, threw them into a deep fryer with spices and blue cheese dip and invented Buffalo Wings.
1965- CBS television network headquarters are moved into a sleek building on 6th Ave. in Manhattan. Because of its black granite and smoke tinted window's it's nicknamed "Black Rock". NBC's headquarters in Rockefeller Center are called "30 Rock". ABC's, owing to their status as the third network, called their headquarters "Little Rock".
1977- NASA launched the Voyager 1 probe towards the outer planets of our solar system. Among the things Voyager discovered was that Jupiter had many more moons than previously thought and had a ring like Saturn. In 2012 it became the first man-made object to leave our solar system is currently in interstellar space.
Part of NASA's program was an explanatory simulation film done on computer by Jim Blinn. It was shown on local news programs in 1980 and 82. The animation was so smooth and the graphics so breathtaking it expanded the use of the CGI medium and inspired a new generation of digital artists.
1983- Filmation's "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" premiered on TV. I Have the Powerrrrrr!!!
1992- Bruce Tim’s Batman the animated series premiered on Fox Kids network.
1993- Two Stupid Dogs premiered on TV.
1994- Patrick McDonnell started drawing the comic strip MUTTS.
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