Uncensored Vintage Photos From The Groovy Era
By | February 12, 2021
Here's a Polaroid of Dolly Parton taken by Andy Warhol in 1985.
You don't really think about Dolly Parton as the kind of person who spent the '70s and '80s hanging out with the likes of Andy Warhol. She's a lot of bit country and he's, well he's Andy Warhol. They seem like they're from two separate worlds. Weirdly, one of the things that makes them so similar is their equal love of show business, after all, Warhol said that everyone in the world will get their 15 minutes of fame.
When Warhol took this photo of Parton he also conducted an interview with her that's as weird as you can imagine. Aside from talking to her about clothes (natch), Warhol asks Parton what she had for breakfast and if she keeps a diary. Parton plays along and has some incredibly sassy answers. On not keeping a diary:
I don’t have to. It seems like for the last 40 years my life has been lived in the press, so I can Google any date in my history and find out what I was doing.
Stars have to do a lot of ridiculous things to promote their films, and that includes acting a fool for international audiences. While promoting the Star Wars films in 1980, Hamill had to be a really good sport when appeared on a German variety show where he wore gold unitard, sat on a big moon, and sang in German. It's uh... it's something.
Hamill spoke about the indignity of the performance in 2018, noting that he didn't think anyone would actually see it. He wrote:
I remember not wanting to wear a gold jumpsuit like a rejected member of ABBA or if I could memorize dialogue in a foreign language-but thought 'Who cares? No one outside of Germany will ever see this!' Thanks to the internet-NOTHING EVER GOES AWAY. Who knew?
Debbie Harry's early life in New Jersey and then New York City was full of wild ups and downs and frightening run-ins with crooks, thieves, and absolute creeps. While speaking about her life in her memoirs and in interviews she maintains that as scary as her early life was, it was all just a variety of experiences that helped her become the icon that she is.
Many of Harry's stories of the early '70s in New York City are horrifying. They show the darkness that closed in on every moment of life, so much so that she now wonders if she should have told anyone. She explained:
I’m sort of wondering if I should have left [the story of her assault] out [of the book], but it’s part of the story. I can’t explain it. I didn’t want it to. I just said: ‘I’m not hurt, I’m alive, I’m doing what I want to do, I have a wonderful boyfriend’ – and that was it. I had to consider what was important to me, and being a victim was really not who I wanted to be.
Happy 80th Birthday wishes go out to actor Nick Nolte!
Is there any actor that better embodies the groovy era mystique of a beefy guy with a mustache than Nick Nolte? No one else comes to mind who can bring together the overall dad vibe in which he traffics with legit acting chops to make something wholly unique.
A star from a strange era, his steely gaze would have been best served in the films of the '50s and '60s, but instead he added a gruffness and an askew way into the films of the '70s, '80s, and '90s. Most notable for his role in Down and Out in Beverly Hills, his offbeat sensibilities make it impossible to take your eyes away from him whenever he's on screen.
Keep your Nolan-verse, enjoy your Academy Award winning Jokers, the greatest story of the world's greatest detective can be found in 1968's The Batwoman. This not so legal adaptation of the Batman story follows a sexy masked superhero as she investigators a scientist heck bent on creating a gill man out of the glands of professional wrestlers?
The film came about thanks to the success of the Batman series on ABC, and it stars Maura Monti. This quckie movie made to get some juice from the success of Batman is definitely made for a B-Movie night, but its all the more fascinating because it's one of 35 feature length films that Monti filmed in six years. Holy paycheck Batman.
Even on those kinetic early seasons of Saturday Night Live there was something about John Belushi that pulled attention from his co-stars. He was like a black hole of comedy, enveloping everything around him, drawing you in and keeping you until the credits rolled.
One of Belushi's trademark characters was the samurai. Sometimes he worked at a deli, other times he was an optometrist or a hotel manager, but there was always a feeling chaos surrounding him. Viewers never knew what was going to happen when Belushi appeared onscreen with that sword and his hair in a bun. Someone could lose an eye, or maybe a piece of the set would go flying.
That chaos, that anything could happen vibe is exactly why Belushi is so important to the world of comedy. Today things feel safe, but with Belushi you never knew what he would do.
Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft in The Graduate (1967)
When Anne Bancroft appeared in The Graduate, all sultry and sly with an eye for the much younger Dustin Hoffman she set the template that every cougar would follow afterwards. As unattainable as Bancroft felt in this role, she did have one love of her life - Mel Brooks.
Yes, that Mel Brooks. The Mel Brooks who lampooned westerns and universal horror movies and dunked on racism and PC culture at the same time. The two met in 1961 at a rehearsal for Perry Como's variety show and they married three years later and stayed together until her death in 2005. Brooks says of the love of his life:
She's always pushed me. She's always been an inspiration. She always thought I was talented. She believed in me right from the beginning, as a songwriter as well as a screenplay writer or whatever I wanted to do. She said, 'You can do it.' There was nobody else. She had everything. She had looks, she had brains, she had purpose.
Seemingly coming out of nowhere in 1978, Robin Williams hit the Earth like a meteor with Mork and Mindy. Sure, he had made small appearances here and there prior to his run as Mork on Happy Days and his own series, but 1978 was when everything came together for this overactive comedy genius with an untold wealth of sadness lurking inside him.
From the moment Williams appeared as Mork from Ork he entered the world's consciousness like a germ and refused to leave. For the next four decades he made insane star turns in films that grew his star until he was almost omnipresent even when he wasn't acting in anything. He was just that good. However, it's this success that burned him out. While speaking with The Guardian in 2010 he admitted that he appeared in so many films over the course of his career because he was afraid that he would disappear:
In one two-year period I made eight movies. At one point the joke was that there's a movie out without you in it. You have this idea that you'd better keep working otherwise people will forget. And that was dangerous. And then you realize, no, actually if you take a break people might be more interested in you.
1976 was a big year for Paul McCartney. Well, just about every year from 1963 onward has been a big year for Paul McCartney but let's not split hairs. With the release of "Wings at the Speed of Sound," McCartney played his first tour in America since the Beatles have their last Stateside performance in 1966. His first show back was at the Tarrant County Convention Hall in Fort Worth, Texas, and he received a 15 pre-show standing ovation.
In the time since American tours the Beatles had broken up, he'd recorded solo material AND founded Wings. The guy stayed busy. But still, he admitted that he was nervous before this string of dates that would be recorded for the live album "Wings over America." He said:
This was big-time American media: 'The Beatle returns. What’s he going to be like?' You want to throw up. But you get on there and you suddenly see, these are your people, this is okay. You’re home.
Cybill Shepherd on the set of the film Taxi Driver (1976)
There's no on that could have pulled off the wide-eyed optimism of Betsy, the political volunteer who finds herself the object of Travis Bickle's admiration in Taxi Driver as well as Cybill Shepherd. At the time she'd only appeared in a few movies but she already felt like a welcome presence on the screen. For all of her memorable scenes, when Shepherd was first cast she didn't actually have any lines. She told Closer:
When I first got the Taxi Driver script, I had no lines! De Niro and [Martin] Scorsese and I improvised at a hotel in Manhattan. Scorsese, I think, videotaped or filmed it, and then he wrote the script based on our improvisations.
It's absolutely wild to think that such an important film started shooting without actually having any lines for one of its most important characters. Then again, that's filmmaking in the 1970s.
President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jaqueline sailing with friends in Newport, Rhode Island in 1962. ⛵️
The Kennedy family were described as a modern day Camelot, WASP royalty taking up space in the American government, but they were regular people. Well, regular people with a yacht. Elected President in 1960, Kennedy is the youngest person hired for the highest office in America and it shows.
While some Presidents spent their days off golfing or just keeping to themselves, Kennedy liked to get out on the water and make a day of it. He was a man about town and didn't think twice about it. Perhaps that's why people are still so drawn to him: he managed to do his (very important) job while recognizing that he needed to take a break every once in a while.
There's something chilling about seeing John Lennon signing autographs. Even when it's just for a normal fan you can't help but think about the fact that one of the people who waited for hours outside of his apartment at the Dakota also shot and killed him.
As frustrating of an artist as John Lennon could be, he was incredibly generous to his fans. He often stopped outside of his apartment on the way to or when coming home from the studio to sign autographs for anyone eagerly awaiting him. We don't really get that from stars today. It's sad that Lennon's generosity played a part in the final moments of his life.
Everybody make way, Wonder Woman and the Bionic Woman are coming through town. These icons of '70s superhero television never worked together on the small screen which is why it's so awesome that they were hanging out with one another in their spare time. Do you think they traded secrets on how to look perfect while fighting crime? Or the best way that one can judo chop an enemy? Or were they just out on the town?
It's cool to see that these two titans of the small screen were able to hang out with one another and not worry about their professional differences. Maybe they were discussing a team up that never came to fruition, or maybe they were strategizing for their next round of Battle of the Network Stars.
You don't really see guys like Jackie Gleason and Steve McQueen hanging out on the regular. Aside from existing in eras of Hollywood that rub up against pone another rather than blend, they led two very different lifestyles. At the time of filming this early dramedy McQueen was also working on The Great Escape and Love with the Proper Stranger, so when Solder in the Rain washed away at the box office it wasn't really a huge deal to the actor.
So why didn't this movie hit like the rest of McQueen's films? It's most likely because it was released a week after JFK's assassination. Audiences weren't exactly looking forward to going to the theater to forget their troubles after such a major tragedy. It makes sense, but it's still a shame that no one went to see this affecting downer of a film.
You're singing it in your head right now, aren't you? "Love is a Battlefield" is one of those songs that it's impossible to escape. The song itself is absolutely stunning. It's a piece of shiny pop-rock that's impossible to ignore, but the thing that really put it over the top was her video for the song which features some seriously stunning '80s rock dancing.
As cool as the video is, Benatar says that learning all of those steps took 48 hours of rehearsal, all of something she was never going to do again. After hours and hours and hours of rehearsal Benatar said that she "couldn't walk for days." It makes you wonder how all those musicians who make dancing a part of their act are able to do it song after song after song.
Eddie Murphy with Rick James, 1980s.
For a brief period of time there was no one cooler than Eddie Murphy and Rick James. These two icons, one of them behind some of the funniest movies of the 1980s and the other behind some of the grooviest tracks of the '70s and '80s, it's no wonder that they were close friends.
James' musical brilliance and Murphy's unstoppable charisma created the unstoppable dance track "Party All The Time." As weird as it was when that song came out, it remains one of the all time greatest dance floor hits, and Eddie Murphy knows it. More than just putting another feather in his cap, the song allowed him to learn from James. He told Billboard:
I just picked up everything inadvertently, from hanging around in the studio all the time. He was a friend of mine and when you were around him, that meant you were always in the studio. So with [James], it was a matter of being in the studio and interested in it. I'd watch how he put the records together and even today, I'll take the same steps, chart my progress the same way.
There's no way to even calculate how much Stevie Nicks has given to the pantheon of rock n roll. As the singer for the most popular iteration of Fleetwood Mac she's written the songs we've danced to at weddings and in high school gyms, and she's belted out anthems with the likes of Tom Petty that are impossible to get out of your head.
In spite of her ups and downs Nicks has never stopped delivering the goods to her fans. Both with the Mac and in her solo work she spent the '70s and '80s delivering some of the most bone shattering pop songs that the world had ever known. Even when she was at her worst she could still hold her audience in the palm of her hand with that mystical voice. Thank heavens for Stevie Nicks.
Hogan's Heroes was a one of a kind show. A workplace comedy set in POW camp, it pitted the Allied Forces against the Nazis decades after the end of World War II while keeping the cameras off the theater of war. With Bob Crane at the helm as the irascible Colonel Robert Hogan the series managed to be light even at its most sardonic.
But there was another side to Crane, one of sex addiction and homemade sex tapes that would make John Holmes blush. According to Crane's son, the actor's dressing room was “porn central,” filled with stag films, Polaroids, and whatever else played into his personal proclivities. Unfortunately, when word of his personal pursuits got out they landed him in hot water. His son told Entertainment Weekly:
He collected photographs of women and put together these books — ‘Oh, here’s Sally from Jacksonville, Florida’ — and then he started showing them to people. He was doing a very bad Disney movie called Superdad, playing an all-American character who cares about his daughter running off with some unsavory type, but at Disney studios in Burbank he’s on the set showing photographs of women that he’s been with to people on the crew. That hurt him because the executives found out... To find out that the all-American Hogan has this…some people call it a dark side, but I don’t think of it as a dark side.
David Bowie and Susan Sarandon worked together on the British horror film The Hunger, 1983.
Playing a vampire in a stylish, sexy horror film like The Hunger must have come naturally to David Bowie. By the early '80s, this ageless rock star was like a force of nature, a creature from another dimension who was blessing the Earth with his presence. On set Bowie kept to himself, he smoked, and he just tried to stay in the moment, but that didn't stop people from acting like weirdoes around him. Dylan Jones, the editor for GQ recalled:
Scott called cut once more and the crew broke for tea. And just as he did, the man pushed his way up the stairs, stopped right in front of Bowie and then carefully dropped to his knees with outstretched arms, holding a little packet above his head as though he were making an offering to the gods. Unsure as to exactly what he should do, Bowie delicately picked up the box to have a closer look. What the man had been so desperate to show his idol was an eight-year-old box of a potent German hair dye called Red Hot Red, the same Red Hot Red that Suzy Fussey had used ten years before to turn his sandy Garboesque locks into the iconic flame-coloured cut seen on Top Of The Pops in July 1972. 'Ha! It's Ziggy!' said Bowie, doing his best David Niven. 'I say, you haven't got a light have you? Would be much appreciated.'
Happy 80th Birthday goes out to Joan Baez on January 9, 2021.
Joan Baez has been turning out protest songs since the late '50s when she began performing in and around Boston, Massachusetts. By the early '60s she was more than just an up and coming singer, she was a part of a movement of folk musicians who poured their heart and souls into their work. She led the charge for change and has never apologized for doing what she believes is right.
As accomplished as Baez is, she'll forever be connected to Bob Dylan through their work together live and in recordings. While that used to bother Baez, she now says that she's happy with her legacy. In 2019, she told The Guardian:
What happened recently was that I painted some pictures of him, and I put his music on, and any stuff that was getting in the way, any jealousies, any resentments, completely vanished... on top of that I felt: oh my God, your name is going to be attached to somebody for the rest of your life… and this is an honor because of what that guy created. And you know, he’s not socially gifted, but that doesn’t matter. He can take an artist’s liberties as far as I am concerned.
Anjelica Huston and Liza Minnelli photographed on a road trip to Mexico in 1975.
There are girls who are cool, and then there are Anjelica Huston and Liza Minnelli in 1975. At the time, Huston was fresh off of a stint as a runway model for brands like Armani and Valentino. She was living with Jack Nicholson and going out for various roles, but at the time she was really just hanging out and having a good time, and you can't argue with that logic.
Huston may have been chilling in the mid '70s, but Minnelli was fairly busy. She released four albums during the decade, but had a quiet stretch between 1973's "The Singer" and 1977's "Tropical Nights." It looks like she spent the years away from the studio bumming around Mexico with Huston, which honestly sounds divine.
So where did these two meet? Most likely during their time working for and hanging out with Halston, the mysterious fashion designer who ruled the '70s. Both women gravitated towards one another, which makes sense. They both had famous parents and they walked the runway. They were the only two people that shared the same experience.
Chewie and Han in a scene from Star Wars Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (1983)
Return of the Jedi may be the end of one of the greatest trilogies ever filmed (or the end of the middle of a nine film series if you want to get technical), but for a lot of people who grew up with Star Wars it was the end of the era, and a fantastic send off to these characters we spent so much time with, but it wouldn't have been so happy in a galaxy far, far away if Harrison Ford had his way.
Before filming ROTJ, Ford pushed George Lucas to kill off Han Solo because he didn't feel like the character served a point after he was rescued from Jabba's Palace (*ahem* someone had to destroy the shield generator). Ford relented and Solo lived through to the end, but that fight stuck with him all the way until he was called back for the JJ Abrams directed Force Awakens. Abrams told Vanity Fair that when it came time to bring the character back it was a bit of a struggle:
We had a meeting and talked about what it would be. Harrison, who is one of the great people ever, and incredibly thoughtful about everything that he does, all he ever wants is to understand the utility of the character. 'What is my role?' It was about sitting with him and explaining what our intention was. We talked about it for quite a while, I sent him the pages. He got it, and of course, as you can see, he was wonderful.
Audiences know Jack Black as the larger than life goofball who anchors films like School of Rock and Tropic Thunder, but his mother led just an interesting of a life, if not more. Judith Love Cohen worked on an engineer who worked on the Pioneer, Apollo, and Hubble missions, and as a dancer with the New York Metropolitan Opera Ballet Company.
It's hard to imagine that kind of duality in a person, but she was clearly someone who never stopped trying to make her life, or the lives of others better. She cared about her fellow humans and wanted to know what was going on in the vastness of space. After Cohen retired from her work as an engineer she wrote and 11-book series about female scientists in order to inform and educate young women on the importance of getting into the sciences. When discussing the series she told the LA Times:
You only think about things when you see people doing it. Most girls know now they can be lawyers [thanks to Ally McBeal]. They know that they can work in an emergency room — they’ve seen ‘ER.’ But I don’t recall that anyone has seen scientists on a large scale, except for a few paleontologists in Jurassic Park.
The book series was a major success, physicist Barbara Wilson from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory explained:
It was really difficult psychologically and emotionally to be better than all the boys in math and science. [The books] really would have helped encourage my feeling good about myself, that this was the direction I wanted to go. I didn’t see role models. I didn’t get encouragement other than at home.
Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal in the film Running Scared (1986)
Do you remember when Billy Crystal was a hot action star? It may have not been a moment in time that lasted for longer than a year or so, but what's important is that it happened. In 1986, Crystal starred with Gregory Hines in Running Scared and as funny as the movie is, the thing that's hard to miss is how ripped Crystal is. At the time, audiences were used to him playing a nebbish goof, but with this movie he showed off that he could also play someone who could grate cheese on their work out sharpened bod.
Today, it's not out of the ordinary to see a star on screen with a totally rockin' bod. Even comedians look like they've spent most of their week doing crunches and double fisting kale and protein powder, but in '86 it was absolutely wild to think about Billy Crystal of all people looking this good.
No one in film history is as weird as James Spader. He is King Weird. With roles in films like Crash (the sexy one, not the Academy Award winning one), Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and Stargate he brought his own brand of strange cool to the screen, but that all started in the 1980s in films like Pretty In Pink and Less Than Zero.
A tangential member of the Brat Pack, Spader brings a menace to those films that feel almost like the bubblegum pop of the era. As nasty as he is in those films, you not only want to know him, you want to be him. Spader says that he really only likes to take a role if he can bring his specific serpentine sexual nature to it, without that possibility he says that he has zero interest. He told The Guardian:
If I’m choosing a project on content it’s through a prism of sexuality, in the oddest corners of someone’s life. I’m not someone so much interested in exploring a slice of life unless that is down the corridor, around the corner, up the alley and down the rabbit hole. That I like.
It makes sense that Betty White and Lucille Ball were friends. In her decades in show business Betty White has worked with and hung out with hundreds, if not thousands of celebrities. Ball was 11 years older than White but she must have seen something special in the eternally youthful comedy star.
Not only did they both work in radio before moving onto television, but they both owned their own production studios. You could say that game recognized game. White says that Ball treated her like a little sister as much as she treated her like a friend, right down to the games they played. She explained:
She was always going to teach me backgammon. So we’d get together and she’d have it all set up. But her idea of teaching was, ‘I’ll take my turn. Now you throw the dice,’ which I would. And then she’d move my pieces here and here, and I’d say, ‘Lucy, how am I going to learn if you’re playing the game with yourself?!’ But we did it a lot and had fun.
More like Rolling Stoneshenge, right? Taken by Michael Cooper, this is one of his many images that show the Stones in their ascent to absolute superstars. This shot is one of many that shows the boys in all of their freaky glory as they traipse around this mysterious rock formation looking like kooky rock n roll wizards.
In 1968, the Stones were growing out of their psychedelic phase and taking a turn towards an octane fueled version of the blues. Keith Richards says that this sea change came from their drift away from Brian Jones and his own rediscovery of a love for the guitar. He said:
Around 1966 or so, after 3 or 4 years of constantly being on the road, rocking the Rolling Stones, I took a little time off and started to listen to some blues again. On the road, none of us had had the time to listen to much beyond the Top 10: our stuff, the Beatles, and Phil Spector's latest. All great records. But when we finally came off the road, I started listening to Blind Blake. A whole lot of blues had become available that we just couldn't get in England back in ‘61 or ‘62... Slowly I began to realize that a lot of them were in very strange tunings. These guys would pick up a guitar, and a lot of times it would be tuned a certain way, and that's how they'd learn to play it. It might be some amazing sort of a mode, some strange thing. And that's why for years you could have been trying to figure out how some guy does this lick, and then you realize that he has this one string that is supposed to be up high, and he has it turned down an octave lower. And later Ry Cooder popped in, who had the tunings down. He had the open G. By then I was working on open E and open D tunings. I was trying to figure out Fred McDowell sh*t, Blind Willie McTell stuff. I used open D on Beggars Banquet. Street Fighting Man is all that, and Jumpin' Jack Flash.
Ed Harris has been around for a while. If you look close enough at the films of the '70s and early '80s you'll see him pop up here and there, but he didn't really achieve name recognition until 1989's The Abyss. After starring in that deep sea science fiction creep fest he maintained a steady presence on the screen which has put him in at least one film a year.
While speaking with the LA Times, Harris is adamant that he doesn't really think about the struggles of his past aside from the fact that he thinks he's done good work. Everything else, he says, is ephemeral:
I think about my work and what I’ve done that day, but am pretty good at accepting it and trusting it. I have a lot of confidence in what I do. And I don’t think that it’s false, I think that it’s earned and I think that it’s justified.
Even with decades of horror films left in its wake The Exorcist still manages to be one of the most frightening movies that's ever come to the big screen. William Friedkin's adaptation of a story about the wages of sin and whether anyone can really win in a fight against the Devil remains a chilling film.
With the help of Linda Blair as the head spinning, pea soup spitting Regan, The Exorcist casts an eerie pall over the audience whenever it plays. Now, with its sets and costumes that make it feel more like a period piece than a modern drama, the film manages to horrify audiences. Maybe it's our fear of Satan, or maybe it's just our fear of losing ourselves that makes this film so upsetting.
There's no movie that's as responsible for the summer blockbuster than Jaws, Steven Spielberg's insanely watchable film about a man eating shark terrorizing the coast of a small island town. Everything about this movie from the broken mechanical shark to the lack of a cohesive script prior to shooting make it what it is, but it's really the cast that pulls this movie together.
Jaws wouldn't be the film it is without Roy Scheider, but he wasn't even on Spielberg's radar when the director was casting the film. Spielberg says that he hadn't run into Scheider at a party then it's likely we'd never have the Sheriff Brody that we know and love today. The director explained:
I tested dozens of possible Brodys. I don’t want to mention any names because many of them are still with us. [Then, Spielberg met Scheider at a party] Roy actually said to me, ‘You have such a glum look on your face. What’s the matter?’ I said, ‘Aw, I’m having trouble casting my picture.’ He actually said, ‘Who have you gone out to?’ I named a few names and he looked at me and said, ‘What about me?’ He actually said, What about ME?!? … I looked at him and said, ‘You’re right! What about you? Will you make my movie?’ Without even asking for a script he said, ‘Of course! If you want me, I’ll do it!’
Bullitt is one of those films that's undeniably entertaining even if you don't care about cars, but if you're a gear head it's a movie that you can't tear your eyes away from. The film features a Highland Green 1968 Ford Mustang at its center, and after performing one of the coolest chase scenes in cinema history it more or less disappeared.
The Mustang was out of the public eye for 40 years, leading fans to speculate about its whereabouts: Was it being kept in storage? Was it stolen and sold off for parts? Was it driven into the dust by some kid who never checked his oil?
The car was actually sold to Bob Kiernan in 1974, his son Sean says that at the time no one really cared that it had been featured in Bullitt. The Mustang was the family's main car for years, but in 1980 it was shut up in a garage with the intention of fixing it up. After his father passed that never happened. The car stayed locked away for years, and it wasn't until one of Sean Kiernan's business associates mentioned the Bullitt car that he told the world where it was hidden. After a lot of back and forth between Kiernan and Ford, the Mustang can now be seen at various events.
The Holiday Inn hotel where Keith Moon celebrated his 21st birthday, 1967.
It's a famous if not somewhat fantastical story. A myth, if you will. As Keith Moon celebrated his 21st birthday while on tour with The Who in America, he made the most of his special day and the pool at the Holiday Inn. Moon was no stranger to chaos, he'd already jumped from hotel roofs and blown his drums up on television, but this was something else altogether.
Supposedly, Moon started a massive food fight, creating nothing but trouble for the hotel staff before he drove a Lincoln Continental directly into the deep end of the Holiday Inn's hotel. Maybe? No one is actually sure if that's what actually happened. Here's what Moon said while he was still alive:
Half-a-dozen cars were parked around this swimming pool. I ran out, jumped into the first car I came to, which was a brand new Lincoln Continental. It was parked on a slight hill, and when I took the handbrake off it started to roll, and it smashed straight through this pool-surround fence, and the whole Lincoln Continental went into the swimming pool – with me in it.
Peter Noone from Herman's Hermits said that Moon never drove a car into a pool, that he simply forgot what happened to the car, but Roger Daltry says otherwise, kind of:
I saw it. We paid the bill [for the damages]. It was $50,000. It’s vague now, but I just remember the car in the pool. But then I read in the biography that never happened, so maybe I’ve been living someone else’s life, I don’t know.
You know, even if this didn't happen let's just pretend it did. The story's better that way.
Eddie Van Halen and wife, Valerie Bertinelli, 1970s.
It can be hard to wrap your head around the people that marry rock stars. Who can say who we're drawn to? Sometimes you just see someone and ZING you're in love. That's what happened with goodie two shoes Valerie Bertinelli and bad boy rocker/guitar genius Eddie Van Halen. The unlikely couple married in 1981 amid throngs of paparazzi.
Bertinelli has said that she thought Van Halen was cute after seeing him on the back of an 8-track, but when they met in person that's when sparks really started flying. Former Van Halen manager Noel E. Monk wrote:
It was kind of cute to see them together— they were both clearly nervous and somewhat reticent. This struck me as a sign of genuine chemistry. After all, Valerie had spent most of her life in front of a camera or audience; she was completely comfortable with all manner of public interaction. And yet, here she was, stammering and blushing like a schoolgirl in the presence of the captain of the football team. And Edward? Here was a guy who went out on stage every night and performed, wizardlike, in front of thousands of adoring fans. In the presence of this young woman, however, the rock star facade melted away.
Isn't filmmaking rad? Don't you just love that filmmakers can create an 11-foot model, film it, and convince you to suspend your disbelief until you think that you're looking at a ship barreling through space? There were multiple models of the Enterprise constructed for the original Star Trek series, but the 11-foot version started coming to life on December 8, 1964, nearly two years before the series premiere.
Designed to be shot from the right angle only, the 11-foot version of the ship is pretty lo-fi. Its windows are painted on and it doesn't have any actual power running to it. The model of the ship that got the most play was actually the 33-inch version which you can see in "The Cage" in every shot except for the one where the camera zooms in on the bridge.
The three, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price, share the screen in the movie House of the Long Shadows, a 1983 comedy horror.
If you're a fan of horror then you know exactly how important each of these three men are. Not only did they each bring gravitas to the genre in the '50s '60s, and '70s when it was seen as nothing more than an excuse for buckets of Karo syrup and red paint to be spilled onscreen, but they all clearly loved being in the films of Roger Corman and the Hammer collecton.
Each of these men went on to find fame because of their roots in the schlocky horror of the mid-century, but they never forgot their roots. Long after he was known as Dracula, Christopher Lee talked his kinship with Vincent Price that began while filming The Oblong Box. He told The Telegraph:
In this picture we were pretending to play chess for a publicity photograph for the film. I don’t play chess and I’m not sure that he did but we had to pretend and found it very amusing. Vincent had a brilliant sense of humour. While we were filming one scene I was lying on the floor, dying – I think I’d had my throat cut – and he was wearing this big voluminous cape. He had to kneel down and ask me something along the lines of 'Who did this to you?’, which didn’t make sense because I would not be able to talk if I’d had my throat slit. All I can remember is him saying to me under his breath, very slowly, 'You are lying on my train.’
Could that really be Tom Hanks? Why yes, that strapping young man in the karate costume is one of our most beloved actors and he's facing down Henry Winkler in this season 10(!) episode of Happy Days. It turns out that this was just the first of many showdowns between the two stars, even if this was scripted.
According to an interview with the famously sweet Winkler, he and Hanks got off on the wrong foot during the first few days of filming Turner and Hooch. Winker was supposed to direct but he was taken off the production shortly after getting started. The only person who's really talked about this decades long beef is Ron Howard who said:
It was disappointing. I’m friends with them both and both men felt compelled to come to talk to me about it. It was just one of those unfortunate things where they really had a working style that did not fit. I know it was painful for both of them and I was able to lend an ear, if not offer any solutions.
"Everybody needs somebody to lean on," or so goes the chorus to the mega hit by The Traveling Wilburys. It turned out that Harrison and Petty took those lyrics seriously. The Wilburys were made up of Tom Petty, George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne, and Roy Orbison, but it was Petty and Harrison who formed the greatest bond.
In 2014, Petty told NPR about his friendship with Harrison, which began as a fandom thanks to the fact that Harrison was a Beatle and all. However, they were able to get over that hump and become actual friends. Petty explained:
We became very good friends, really, for decades. I don't like to bring it up that much, because The Beatles are so special that people might see it as boasting or something. But he actually became my friend, past being a Beatle to me. It was like having an older brother that had a lot of experience in the music business, someone who I could go to with my troubles and questions. I think [spirituality], probably, was the greatest gift he gave me. He gave me a way of understanding a higher power without it being stupid, or having tons of rules and books to read. But the best thing I can say to people that are curious about that is George was probably everything that you thought he was, and then some more.
Happy Birthday to the late Ronald Reagan born on February 6, 1911.
If it weren't for his political career the world may have forgotten about Ronald Reagan completely by the 1980s. With films like Bed Time for Bonzo and King's Row, Reagan was a guy who was seen as a good supporting actor but not someone who could bring power to a leading role.
World War II changed Reagan's career forever. He enlisted in the service but was told that he wouldn't be sent overseas because his eyesight was too poor. Instead, he reported to Culver City where he started acting and narrating inspirational films about America's war effort produced by Warner Bros.
As the face of the war effort, people saw Reagan as the model American. The guy you wanted to get in the trenches with even if he wasn't actually allowed to get into the trenches without a thick pair of spectacles.
In the late '60s there was nothing better than waking up on Saturday morning, pouring yourself a big bowl of cereal and tuning into The Banana Splits. The series followed a group of super weird looking creatures designed by the folks behind HR Puffenstuff, Sid and Marty Krofft.
Produced by Hanna-Barbera, The Banana Splits was sort of a variety show and sort of total freak out if you were into any kind of psychedelics at all. The band scored a radio hit, "The Tra La La Song (One Banana, Two Banana)," that was ghost written by N.B. Winkless Jr. on his living room piano, the same one that was the muse for the Rice Crispies "Snap, Crackle, Pop" jingle.
Long after the series was canceled the Banana Splits continued on as characters in their own made for TV movie, educational films, and even a horror-comedy adaptation in 2019.
Has anyone ever looked as cool as Yul Brynner looks in this shot? Seriously, what a way to arrive at the premiere of a new film, he's dressed sharp and he looks like he means business. Brynner was known for being confrontational on set, he had a way he though things needed to be and he usually got his way. This kind of my way or the highway behavior can probably be attributed to the fact that he wanted to be a director, not an actor.
Brynner was never able to make the career change from acting to directing, but he channeled that desire to be behind the camera into truly stunning photography. His daughter explained:
I think that his passion for directing was very repressed when he went into acting. The success of his acting really took him by surprise. Photography was sort of a continuation for him of directing; it was enabling him to continue to be an artist. I think he was someone who had real philosophical debates in life, and photography somehow must have fed his soul or another side of him that wasn’t filled by the actor.
