Some of Newhart’s most fondly remembered routines hilariously skewered Madison Avenue. In “Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue,” an increasingly flustered imagemaker tries to get Abe to stick to the Gettysburg Address script (“You changed four score and seven to eighty-seven? Abe, that’s meant to be a grabber.”) That routine kicks off The Button-Down Mind of Bob … Read more
According to Simmons himself, he struggled with overeating as early as four years old, and by the time he was in his twenties his large frame led to background roles in Fellini’s “Satyricon” and “The Clowns,” which he filmed while he studied art in Florence. After he went on an unhealthy crash diet to lose … Read more
Altman cast her as an Astrodome tour guide Suzanne in “Brewster McCloud,” and her pitch about the art became a part of her character’s dialogue. They continued to work together including two of his best films, “Nashville,” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” one of his most intriguingly confounding, “3 Women,” and one of his biggest failures, … Read more
If that narrative sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the story of every Cameron film since 1991. Cameron’s “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” was the most expensive movie of his career at that point in time, and the most expensive ever made, with a budget of over $100 million, and ended up making $581 million in theaters … Read more
A Los Angeles native, Robert Bertram Schwartz graduated from Pomona College, seeking a life as an actor after leaving school. As luck would have it, he ended up in an acting class with Roger Corman. When Corman became a producer of low-budget classics, he hired Towne to write a film called “Last Woman on Earth,” … Read more
He was born in Chicago on August 18, 1943, the son of an actress and an engineer, and moved from there to Ohio with them when he was two. After relocating with his family to New Canaan, Connecticut, at 15, he studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. It’s a field in which … Read more
Cobb’s presence could help sell narratives of historical trauma because he could so easily project internal conflict. That he’d been hiding something, swallowing years of injustice, now worn as a perpetual scowl. In movies like “Carolina Skeletons,” “Ghosts of Mississippi,” and the incredible “Nightjohn,” he’s a man who’s seen it all. “Nightjohn” is the best … Read more
Throughout his baseball career and after, Mays was often seen on television screens in other ways. He appeared as himself in episodes of “This is Your Life,” “The Donna Reed Show,” “Bewitched,” “The Joe Namath Show,” “The Merv Griffith Show” and more. He also voiced himself in the animated short “Willie Mays and the Say-Hey … Read more
He opened the 1980s by co-starring beside Mary Tyler Moore in the critically acclaimed “Ordinary People,” which braved new territory in dramatizing family dysfunction. The movie garnered six Oscar nominations (winning four, including Best Picture, Best Director, and for young Timothy Hutton, Best Supporting Actor). Sutherland was again bypassed. Since 1990, Sutherland has appeared in … Read more
Morgan Spurlock started his career as a writer before co-founding his own studio in 2004 named Warrior Poets. One of his first major projects was for MTV, where he created a web show called “I Bet You Will,” which is exactly what it sounds like: How much does it cost to get people to do … Read more