Word: orsones
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When producer John Houseman suggested The War of the Worlds as the Mercury Theater's Halloween eve broadcast, director and star Orson Welles laughed it off as silly and dull. Eventually, the idea surfaced to update the 1898 H.G. Wells story and split it into two. The first part would take the form of a series of musical pieces broken up by increasingly urgent news bulletins. No radio play before had toyed with the form like this, and the bulletins - at this point old hat to Americans familiar with the dire updates coming out of Europe - gave the story...
...history at the National War College. McCain's Vietnam lessons dovetailed with the World War II lessons he had learned at home. He even believed his father should have resigned to protest President Lyndon Johnson's insufficient aggression. "John gets that appeasement doesn't work with our enemies," says Orson Swindle, a fellow POW who later served in the Reagan Administration. "They have to know that if they slap us, we're going to knock the hell out of them...
...small things in boxes; his writing championed the cramped brilliance of little men in tight spots - in the B movies he loved and, through his writing, helped raise from forgotten to fashionable, from gargoyles to saints. At the same time he sniped at critics' darlings like Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. (Citizen Kane was "exciting but hammy.") Above all, he urged the moviegoer's attention away from plot and social message and toward the vital energy occurring, as W.H. Auden wrote of Brueghel's Icarus, "Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot / Where the dogs go on with their doggy...
...Piaf--until Lena herself became a name to drop. The pools of Hollywood opened up to Lena when she became one of the first black film stars to escape the costume of a maid's uniform, in Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather. John Barrymore kissed her hand. Orson Welles tried, unsuccessfully, to go further. Lena and Gail settled down across the street from the Humphrey Bogarts, and Gail went to school with Natalie Wood. If Lena's durable career seems to have been plucked from the book of an MGM musical of the '40s, Gail's life edges...
...that happen?), Heston would often venture beyond the epic. He made plenty of Westerns, some important science-fiction films, a few comedies (for which he was constitutionally unsuited). And he was willing to fight for directors he believed in. He assured the financing of Touch of Evil, Orson Welles' most satisfying post-Citizen Kane Hollywood film, by agreeing to star in it. He also offered to give back part of his salary so Sam Peckinpah could finish Major Dundee as he'd planned. (The story goes that the producers took the money but didn't allow the extra shooting. Even...