The First Symposium of nominated Animated Features was a big success. A sellout crowd heard me interview the directors of BOLT, KING FU PANDA and WALL-E. Thanks to all who made it happen, I had a great time.

You want this?Eh? you want this..?

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Question: In live action movies, why do you strike a set, when you take it down?

Yesterdays Quiz answered below: President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama plan a series of regular Weds night cocktail receptions at the White House. Who originated the idea?
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History for 2/20/2009
Birthdays: Honore' Daumier, Nancy Wilson, Ansel Adams, Sidney Poitier, Cindy Crawford, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Robert Altman, Roger Penske. Phil Esposito, Jennifer O’Neill, Ivanna Trump, Mike Leigh, Lili Taylor

1258- The Mongol horde under Hulugau stormed Baghdad. They were ordered by Genghis Khan not to spill any royal blood so they took the last Caliph, Al Mostassim- Billah, rolled him in a blanket then galloped the Mongol Horde over him. Ouch. The beautiful city of the Arabian Nights was sacked and burned for 40 straight days. Chroniclers said 800,000 died and the streets ran with rivulets of liquid gold- melting from the gilded books in the burning libraries. To the Europeans who had just lost the Crusades, this new force from the East was first thought to be the armies of Prester John, the magical-mythical monk-king of Cathay. St. Louis of France even sent envoys for an alliance. But after word came of that northern pincer of the Mongol army had destroyed Budapest, Moscow, Kiev and Cracow they changed their minds. The knights of the west called them Tartars after the ancient Greek name for hell, Tartarus.

1702-British King William III goes riding around Hampton Court when his horse Sorrel steps in a molehole and threw him. William of Orange suffered a broken collarbone but being already elderly, tuberculant and asthmatic, died within a week. Friends of his enemy the exiled Stuart King James II drank a toast to the 'Little man in the velvet coat', meaning the mole who dug the hole.

1725- FIRST DOCUMENTED SCALPINGS- British militia scalped ten Indians in New Hampshire. Indians of the Eastern seaboard and Caribbean had done the practice before. Now colonial authorities encouraged allied tribes to bring in scalps as a way of proving how many of the enemy they had killed, before they were paid a cash bounty. Scalps soon became a fashionable novelty item in for sale in London. Tribes adopted different scalp cuts so you would know who did it -the Cheyenne preferred a diamond cut, Sioux an oval pattern.

1816- "Fee-Garr-Row! Fig-Ar- Roww- Figaro-Figaro,Figaro,Figaro"- Giacomo Rossini's opera 'The Barber of Seville' premiered. Rossini endured bad press and heavy criticism at the time because the another opera of the Marriage of Figaro had just been premiered by Paisiello, an inferior composer who was much more popular than he.

1845- The Battle of the Cahuenga Pass-Angry Spanish Californians led by ranchero Juan de Alvarado clashed with the regular Mexican governor Miguel de Micheltorena. The only casualty was a mule. The story of Alvarado may be one of the origins of Zorro.

1925- Willis O’Brien’s silent movie the Lost World premiered. The stop motion animation of dinosaurs and exploding volcanoes issued in a new era of special effects films.

1936- The film “Follow the Fleet” with Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers premiered.

1939- The American Nazi Party held their largest rally in Madison Square Garden in New York City. 20,000 Americans goose-stepped and Sieg-Heiled under a huge portrait of George Washington, while angry anti-Fascist and Jewish groups rioted outside. By 1941 most of the German American Bund dissolved. During the war 10,000 German Americans were interned along with the Japanese and Italians. Fritz Kuhn, the organizer of the rally was jailed for embezzling his organizations funds and deported to Germany in 1946

1962- "God Go with You, John Glenn !" Mercury -7 sends the first American into orbit.
Glenn later became a Democratic senator and in his 70’s went into space a second time on a space shuttle in 1998. His first words upon emerging from the space capsule were:”It was hot in there.” John Glenn was a combat Marine pilot, test pilot and astronaut but even he sometimes got the willies. In 1968 while traveling with the Robert Kennedy for President entourage their chartered plane hit turbulence. Bobby Kennedy undid his seat belt, stood up and said to the cabin “ I have an announcement- Colonel Glenn is Scared!”

1980- Bon Scott, vocalist for the band AC/DC, was found dead in a friend’s automobile choked in his own vomit.

1986- The Soviets launch the first permanent orbiting space station, Mir, which means Peace. After a long career in which 7 US astronauts among many others spent time there in 2001 it finally was brought down to burn up in orbit.

2006- The animated film Wallace & Gromet: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, won the British Academy Award (BAFTA) for the best British Film of the year. It beat out the Constant Gardner, and Pride & Prejudice.
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Yesterdays Question: President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama plan a series of regular Weds night cocktail receptions at the White House. Who originated the idea?

Answer: First Lady Dolly Madison in 1805. President Madison was a low-key bookish type. Modern scholars liken him to a Bill Gates of the quill-pen set. Dolly thought these informal weds night mixers would be a way for powerful congressmen to mingle and she could build a constituency for her husband.

Last week, the Hollywood entertainment industry was rocked by the news that the Motion Picture Fund Hospital and Residence was broke and was closing.

the late Roddy McDowell at a fundraiser for the MPH

The fund was started in 1940 and to retire to the home all you needed was twenty years in show-business, union or non-union, performer, technician or executive. Past residents included Max Fleischer, Larry Fine, Cal Howard and Looney Tunes director Art Davis. Currently I stop in to visit Chris Jenkins, who directed many of Rocky & Bullwinkle Show episodes and created Super Chicken for the Tom Slick Show.
They run a great Hospital Clinic which Pat & I have used in the past, as well as many other industry people.

Today The Motion Picture & Television Fund Long-Term Care unit is planning
to evict 130+ of its oldest, weakest, most needy and disabled
residents beginning in mid-March. This decision affects not only
those residents in Long-Term Care, but every resident in assisted and
residential care on the Wasserman Campus who may one day require the
next level of care.

When asked by members of Saving the Lives of Our Own, CEO Dr. David Tillman responded that no amount of money could be raised that would change the decision to close the facilities.

The Motion Picture Home was supported by Hollywood biggies like Bob Hope, John Ford, Sam Goldwyn and Walt Disney. It survived the collapse of the old studio system in the 1960s, and every financial crisis since. It seems strange that an industry that can give $20 million to one actor and routinely float budgets up to $200 million a movie, suddenly can't afford enough to keep this great institution going.

Spencer Tracy and Walt Disney at a celebrity polo match at the Will Rogers estate to benefit the Motion Picture Fund. Courtesy of Corbis images.

Humphrey Bogart once said of our industry:"These guys love ya, so long as you can make them a buck. Soon as that's over, they forget you ever existed..."

The motto of the Home was " We Take Care of Our Own." Now grass-roots movements are starting to rally among filmdom's denizens to do something to save the hospital. check out their site:

http://www.savingthelivesofourown.org/

See you tonight at the Anim Feature nom Directors Symposium at the Academy.

http://www.oscars.org/events-exhibitions/events/2009/animatedfeature.html

I'm cramming today, so I don't sound stoopid when I talk to deeze folks.

Quiz: President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama plan a series of regular Weds night cocktail receptions at the White House. Who originated the idea?

Yesterdays’ question answered below: Of these U.S. Presidents, which one was not once a lawyer? Abraham Lincoln, James Madison, Richard Nixon, Andrew Johnson?
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HISTORY FOR 2/19/2009
Birthdays: Copernicus, Luigi Boccherini, Smokey Robinson, Andre Breton, Lee Marvin, Sir Cedric Hardwicke. Karen Silkwood, Paul Terry, Paul Krause, Merl Oberon, Amy Tam the author of the Joy Luck Club., John Frankenheimer, Jeff Daniels, Benicio Del Toro is 42, Hilary Duff is 23

Today is the Feast of Saint Wulfstan of Worchester

197AD- General Septimius Severus of the African Legions had seized control of the Roman Empire and had himself declared emperor. This day he defeated his last rival, Albinus ,the Commander of the legions of Gaul. He left Albinus’ dead body in front of his headquarters, where for fun he trampled it repeatedly with his horse. This was before office desk Nerf-basketball was invented. Albinus‘ corpse layed around being torn by dogs and vermin for days until it stank so bad, it was flung into a nearby stream.

1405- Timur Khan, called Timur the Lame or Tamerlane in the west, died at 69 of a fever. Tamerlane wreaked a path of destruction almost as horrible as Genghis Khan two centuries earlier. Raging up and down the Near East and Western China, his personal touch was leaving pyramids of human skulls to show he’d stopped by. But because Genghis had already "been there, done that..." history doesn't really pay much attention to him, proving you can be genocidal as long as you’re not redundant.

1600-In Rome philosopher Giordano Bruno was stripped naked and burned at the stake with a nail hammered through his tongue. The monk was one of the first modern free thinkers and skeptics. He raged against superstition and denied there was any such thing as Hell or Purgatory. But his chief sin that got him burned was his expansion on the Copernicus Theory. He said that not only is the Earth revolving around the sun but that the Universe is Infinite and unfathomable, that God should not be belittled, as being focused on one little people on one rock. He is an Infinite Presence ruling over countless worlds. Later scientists like Galileo and Descartes kept Bruno’s fate in mind when they went too far in bucking Holy Mother Church.

1674- The Second Treaty of Breda settled the Third Dutch War with England. As part of the settlement Holland gave up any chance of getting back her colonies in North America, now renamed by the English New York and New Jersey. Truth be told they weren’t bringing in any income anyway. They were considered of little value.

1725- The first recorded case of someone dying of spontaneous combustion.

1847-“ ARE YOU FROM CALIFORNIA OR ARE YOU FROM HEAVEN?” The Donner Party found at last. The wagon train of settlers had been trapped in the High Sierra mountains of California near Lake Truckee in blizzard conditions with no food since last October 31st. Half the settlers were dead and the rest subsisting on cannibalizing the dead for food. This day a survivor named John Reed who got to safety returned with a rescue party from Sutter’s Fort. Of the 89 original settlers only 45 made it out alive. One opened a restaurant.

1878- Thomas Edison patented the phonograph.

1913- Crackerjacks start putting toy prizes in every box. The name Crackerjack for the caramel corn was named for the reaction of Teddy Roosevelt trying it for the first time- These are Crackerjack!

1915- L.A. Times publisher and land baron Harry Chandler was indicted with 8 other prominent Angeleanos for conspiring to start a new revolution in Mexico. The Mexican government had seized their large land holdings there for land redistribution and this was their quaint little way of getting them back.

1920- THE MYSTERY OF ANASTASIA- This day came the first news reports that a emotionally disturbed young woman who tried to jump into a Berlin canal claimed to be the Archduchess Anastasia Romanov, youngest child of the Czar and Czarina of Russia. She somehow escaped the 1918 murder of her family and tried to prove it by recalling minute details about the Imperial household. She was called Anna Anderson and was the toast of New York and Parisian society for awhile. But unlike the Ingrid Bergman movie the Romanov family in exile never took her seriously and Anna eventually married and settled down. In 1991 extensive laboratory attempts to match her DNA with the Romanovs proved she was not the little archduchess.



1942-PRESIDENT FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT signed Executive Order# 9066- The JAPANESE INTERNMENT ACT- All along the Pacific Coast first and second generation Japanese-Americans were uprooted from their homes and property and with what only they could carry were shipped off to camps in the desert. Few Japanese-Americans were interned in Hawaii however, because it would have seriously depleted the population. Many got no restitution for their lost property. America remembered how effective German agents were in the First World War, when bombs going off on Boston and New York waterfront docks was common. Throughout the Second World War no act of Japanese-American sabotage was ever recorded. Apologists would say it was because of the act. Although the F.B.I. kept tabs on German and Italian agents in U.S. and pro-Fascist groups like the American Bund flourished in the 30’s nothing like what happened to Japanese Americans occurred to them. Less than 10,000 were rounded up as opposed to over 100,000 Japanese Americans.

1945- THE INVASION of IWO JIMA-The nine mile square bit of barren beach cost over 50,000 lives. This island and Okinawa were the test cases to judge how fiercely the Japanese would fight for mainland Japan. Iwo Jima was the first island that wasn't conquered territory of some other people but was considered part of the home Japanese Islands, only 700 miles from Tokyo.

1944- Writer John Steinbeck asked that his name be taken off of the credits for the Alfred Hitchcock film version of “Lifeboat”. “In view of the fact that my script for the picture was distorted in production.”

1945- Nazi S.S. leader Heinrich Himmler contacted the neutral Swedish diplomat Count Bernadotte to try and open secret peace talks with the Allies behind Hitler's back. Bernadotte asks as a condition that all concentration camps in the Reich be turned over to the International Red Cross. Himmler balks at this but agrees to allow food packages to be delivered to Nordic inmates. When Hitler finds out Himmler was trying to cut his own deal he was extremely upset and Himmler was under house arrest at the end of the war.

1951-Poet philosopher Andre Gide died in Paris. Several things were quoted as his last words, my favorite is " Before you quote me, please make sure I'm conscious."

1954- The prototype Ford Thunderbird auto completed.

1960- Bill Keane's "Family Circus" cartoon strip debuts.

1968- “ It’s a beautiful day in the Neighborhood…” Mister Roger’s Neighborhood debuted on National Education Television, later called PBS. Ordained Presbyterian minister Fred Rogers had been doing children’s shows similar in Pittsburgh and Canada since the 50’s but today was the start of his show that would run unchanged for thirty-five years.

1985 - Mickey Mouse welcomed in China.

1995- Pamela Anderson married rocker Tommy Lee. On their honeymoon they shot that notorious video on Lake Powell.
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Yesterdays’ question: Of these U.S. Presidents, which one was not once a lawyer? Abraham Lincoln, James Madison, Richard Nixon, Andrew Johnson?

Answer: James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights.

Quiz: Of these U.S. Presidents, which one was not once a lawyer? Abraham Lincoln, James Madison, Richard Nixon, Andrew Johnson?

Yesterdays’ question answered below: In live action moviemaking, what is a Martini Shot?
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History for 2/18/2009
Birthdays: Queen Mary I Tudor -Bloody Mary, Pietro Guarnieri the violin maker, Harry Grover- Seeley one of the founders of Paleontology, Louis Tiffany, Andre Segovia, Wendell Wilkie, Billy de Wolfe, Enzo Ferrarri, Yoko Ono is 76, Jack Palance, Milos Forman is 77, Bobby Bachman of the Bachman Turner Overdrive, Gahan Wilson, Johnny Hart, Matt Dillon is 45, Cybil Shephard is 59, John Travolta is 55, John Hughes, Dr. Dre

1842- Two hundred of New York City’s high society and top politicians held a banquet in honor of the visiting English author Charles Dickens. Dickens kept confounding everyone with his insistence on touring the cities prisons and poorhouses.

1856- The KNOW NOTHING PARTY held their first –and only, presidential convention. Officially called the American Party but famous for responding to reporters questions as “they knew nothing” This 3rd party was formed over anger at growing immigration. They sought to curb the influx and civil rights of non-native born Americans especially Roman Catholics from Ireland and Italy. They nominated ex president Millard Filmore for re-election but their ranks were broken up over disputes over slavery and their movement sputtered out.

1878- THE LINCOLN COUNTY WARS- John Tunstall, a Scottsman who gave a number of young cowboys work on his ranch in New Mexico, was murdered while his bodyguards were hunting wild turkeys. Tunstall was buried in his clan tartan kilt. This murder sparked a running gun battle between Tunstall's group led by his attorney John McSweeny, a town merchant named Murphy, rancher John Chisum and most of the county. One of Tunstall's hired hands turned this range war into a personal vendetta that would make his name famous- Billy the Kid.

1885-Mark Twain's 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' published.

1888- The Hotel Coronado in San Diego Cal. opened for guests. It remains one of the largest remaining wood structures in the U.S.. Several presidents stayed there, the Duke of Windsor may have met Mrs. Simpson there and films like the Marilyn Monroe film Some Like it Hot and The Stuntman were shot there.

1930- The planet Pluto discovered- in 1909 Scientist Lord Percival Lowell had detected signs of a planet at the edge of our Solar System beyond Neptune but could not definitely confirm or identify it. They named it for the time being 'Planet X' The Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff Arizona had searched in vain for decades until Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tumbaugh, an amateur astronomer who was allowed to occasionally use Lowell’s telescope to justify the public grants they got. Lord Lowell had just passed away before the discovery he had dedicated his life to. Recently a consortium of scientists demoted Pluto from a planet back to just a big-ass icy asteroid status.

1950- First Mr. Magoo cartoon "Ragtime Bear".

1953- First 3-D movie "B'wana Devil" starring Robert Stack.

1970- The Chicago 7, Yippie leaders of the anti-war rioting in front of the Democratic presidential convention of 1968 were found innocent of all charges. David Dillinger, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, Tom Hayden and the other guys. One of their offenses was trying to get a 250 pound pig onto the floor of the Convention so they could get it nominated for President.

1972- President Richard Nixon and Pat Nixon land in China.

1973- Richard Petty the Stock Car King won his first Daytona 500 race . He would go on to win 6 more and prove that NASCAR racing was one of America’s favorite though most under reported sports.

2001- Dale Earnhardt Sr, the reigning NASCAR racing car champion, died in a crash on the final lap of the 2001 Daytona 500. His eldest son Dale Jr. placed second.
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Yesterday’s Question: In live action moviemaking, what is a Martini Shot?

Answer: The last shot of a long day of shooting, which means drinks to follow.