Word: rko
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...titles of their RKO movies changed - "Flying Down to Rio," "The Gay Divorc?e," "Top Hat," "Roberta," "Follow the Fleet," "Swing Time," "Shall We Dance," "Carefree," "The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle" - but their roles were pretty constant. Fred was nature's nobleman, Ginger the plucky girl who made good by dancing well. It didn't matter that the films' plots were aggressively silly, the dialogue often inane. The musical numbers had a formula too: Fred courting Ginger, pursuing her in song and dance, while she ponders her ethical or emotional reservations to dancing-romancing; he approaches, she retreats...
...Before there was Gene Kelly (and after), there was Fred Astaire, the creator and apotheosis of movie dance. By the time Kelly got to Hollywood in 1941, Astaire had already completed his amazing series of RKO musicals with Rogers. Among other things, this run of eight films - from "Flying Down to Rio" in 1933 to "The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle" in 1939 - established the gangly Fred Austerlitz from Omaha as the most elegant man in the world...
...Theatre to the air and, on October 30th, offered a Mischief Night ad-aptation of "The War of the Worlds" - a sensation when thousands of listen-ers took fright, and flight, from the story of a Martian colonization of America. And in 1941, five days before Welles? 26th birthday, RKO released "Citizen Kane," a sensation that publisher William Randolph Hearst tried to stop because he believed it was a libel on his life. The film, a financial flop when released, is now commonly called the greatest ever made...
...three events have inspired feature films: the 1999 Tim Robbins film "The Cradle Will Rock," the 1975 ABC TV movie "The Night That Panicked America" and the 1999 HBO docudrama "RKO 281." From his first flush as a prodigy to his long maturity, when he ballooned or diminished into the butt of fat jokes, Welles spurred countless anecdotes, gossip, myths, not all of his own making. His life and films have been the subject of more than 100 books. But none of them is primarily about Welles? radio career...
...crew and a great ape to Komodo Island and somehow get the ape to fight a lizard on film. There were some logistical problems (I wonder what they could have been?) and the plan never got off the ground. A couple years later Cooper was asked by newly appointed RKO studio head David O. Selznick to compile an inventory of every piece of film in the library. Cooper came across some sequences from an unfinished stop-action animation film called "Creation," the pet project of animator Willis O'Brien (more on him in a moment). As soon as Cooper...