BACK to Blog Posts


Today is the Martha Baxton Auction at the Cal Arts campus in Valencia. Things kick off at 5:00PM. Even if you didn't go to Cal Arts or know Martha, this is a great place for animation and Disneyana fans to get some real bargains. Go to their website http://baxton.mrkurtnielsen.com/ and check out the items, it's really special stuff. A Milt Kahl sketch from Robin Hood, John Musker caricatures of Tim Burton and John Lassiter, cels and drawings from The Little Mermaid, Iron Giant, Who Framed Roger Rabbitt, Sleeping Beauty, Tron and much more. 170 items last I heard. And on your taxes it's a charitable contribution as well!

----------------------------------------------------------------
Birthdays: Antonio Frescobaldi, Captain William Bligh, Cliff Robertson, Angela Cartwright, Alf Landon, Dee Dee Sharpe who sang the 60's R&B hit the Mashed Potato, Michael Keaton, Adam Sandler, Otis Redding, Anita Ekberg, Hugh Grant, Topol, Colonel Lyman Sanders the Kentucky Fried Chicken founder, James Hilton-writer who created the name for the paradise Shangri-La for his novel Lost Horizon

1908- THE PATENTS TRUST- Thomas Edison, Charles Pathe and Leon Gaumont form the Motion Picture Patents Group. Called the "Trust", their attempt to monopolize movie production and strangle off the independents had a lot to do with the early filmmakers exodus to Los Angeles. Otherwise the film capitol of the world would have been Ft. Lee, New Jersey. The only positive result of the trust was they enforced a regular industry standard for film stock of 35 mm running at 24 frames per second. It seems the Mitchell Camera Company was developing a motorized motion picture camera to replace the hand crank variety but they needed an official speed to set it at. In a contentious meeting of the Trust held at the Waldorf Astoria no one could settle on a single speed. Finally the compromise was made to make it the number of delegates in the room- 24.

1910-Alice B. Toklas moved in permanently with Gertrude Stein in the 22 Rue de Flerus in Paris. Until Steins death in 1946 they held court in one of the most glittering social networks of twentieth century Paris. Regular soirees included Picasso, Matisse, Dali, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Max Ernst, Virgil Thompson, Sherwood Anderson, Max Ernst, Guilliame Apollinaire and Carlos Santayanna. But the ultra modern was not to everyone’s taste. Painter Mary Cassatt only visited once. She later told a friend:" I never saw so many horrible things, I never met so many horrible people!"

1920- Silent movie star Olive Thomas, nicknamed America's Kid Sister, partied a little too hard at the Dead Rat Cafe in Paris. The 21 year old died of an overdose of cocaine and alcohol. Her nude body was discovered wrapped in a full length ermine fur left on her couch. The scandal started the first investigation of drugs in Hollywood. It netted an army captain named Spaulding who admitted that film stars like Thomas, Mabel Normand and Ramon Navarro were regular clients for morphine, heroin and cocaine. Shortly after Groucho Marx put in his vaudeville show Animal Crackers the song Hooray for Captain Spaulding, the African Explorer.

1926 – The National Broadcasting Company or NBC created by Radio Corporation of America RCA. Under the direction of David Sarnoff it became the powerhouse network of broadcasting, recording and television.

1939- The first Andy Panda cartoon.

1939- The first day of shooting on Charlie Chaplin’s film the Great Dictator.

1939- A small theater in Riverside Cal was the site of a secret test screening of the completed Gone With the Wind.

1945- The first bug in a computer program discovered by Grace Hopper. A moth was removed with tweezers from a relay & taped into the log. Since then any computer glitch was nicknamed "a bug".

1950 - 1st use of TV laugh track invented by Hank McCune.

1956- Elvis Presley appeared on nationwide television on the Ed Sullivan Show. Sullivan himself had vowed never to have the kid on his show but caved in to network pressure. He stayed home that first time and actor Charles Laughton was the substitute host. CBS Network censors thought the gyrations of Elvis' pelvis so obscene that in many markets they blacked out the lower portion of the screen so he was covered the waist down.

1967- Jay Ward's George of the Jungle t.v. show with SuperChicken and Tom Slick premiered.

1982- Princess Grace of Monaco, the former movie actress Grace Kelly, died in a car accident on the mountainous hill roads of Monaco. Twenty years earlier in the film To Catch a Thief, Alfred Hitchcock had her drive her car at dangerous speeds over the exact same hairpin turns.


RSS