Birthdays: Marlon Brando would be 100, King Henry IV of England (1361), Washington Irving, William Marcy "Boss"Tweed, Sally Rand the Fan Dancer, Bud Fisher “Mutt & Jeff”, Ma Rainey, Iron Eyes Cody, Wayne Newton, Doris Day, Robert Sherwood, Virgil Grissom, Marsha Mason, Melissa Etheridge, Amanda Byrnes, David Hyde Pierce is 67, Alec Baldwin is 67, Eddie Murphy is 64, Jane Goodall is 91.
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1860-The Pony Express system started. Relay riders from Saint Louis across the prairies and deserts all the way to Sacramento, California. Ten days to get a letter from St. Jo to Denver. For all its romance, The Pony Express failed after just 2 years. Stagecoaches and telegraph wires soon covered the same message business much more easily.
1869- First performance of Edvard Grieg's Piano Concerto in A minor.
1897-composer Johannes Brahms died.
1920- Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald married.
1941- With the possibility of a labor strike at his studio, and war looming, Walt Disney held the first meeting with U.S. government officials to try and obtain work for training films.
1943- Conrad Veidt, famed German actor who played the evil Major Strasser in Casablanca, collapsed and died on the Riviera Golf Course in Los Angeles. He was 50 and suffered from a heart condition, not helped by his chain smoking. Veidt was anti-Nazi and had a Jewish wife. He put in his contract that in movie roles he wanted to play suave evil nazi bad guys. His death occurred just as his movie Casablanca was receiving rave reviews.
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!" After an academy screening in Hollywood, movie star Rock Hudson walked out saying” Will someone please tell me what the hell that was about?”
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 of 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 little iceball cost the Walt Disney Company over one billion dollars.
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