Gone With or Without fanfare

[Ollie]

I just saw that Errol Morris' frequent film-editor, 39-year-old Karen Schmeer, has been killed by a speeding robbery-getaway car in Manhattan. Grrr. Thieves were robbing a CVS Pharmacy, hopped in a car and took off, killing Schmeer at an intersection.

[Lzcutter]

Producer of the Andy Griffith show passes away:

From the LA Times:

Aaron Ruben, a veteran comedy writer and producer who died Saturday at the age of 95, produced the first five seasons of "The Andy Griffith Show," the gentle-humored 1960s TV classic starring Griffith as Sheriff Andy Taylor.

In 1970, when Ruben was producing "The Headmaster," a dramatic series in which Griffith played the headmaster of an elite private school, The Times' television columnist Cecil Smith found that the show was a long way from Mayberry: The series opener dealt with student drug use.

"Both Andy and I said we won't come back on television with one of the old formula shows," Ruben told Smith. "They won't work anymore. I wouldn't put the old Griffith show on today. I started 'Gomer Pyle,' but I wouldn't consider a show like that now.

"It's a different world. You can't expect an audience that's been to see [the movies] 'MASH' or 'Medium Cool' to be concerned about whether Aunt Bee finishes the patchwork quilt in time for the bazaar."

A longer obit to follow in the Times.

[Lzcutter]

Screenwriter of Harriet Craig and blacklisted writer, Anne Froelick Taylor, has passed away:

From the LA Times:

Anne Froelick Taylor, a Hollywood screenwriter who co-wrote the 1950 Joan Crawford drama "Harriet Craig" but whose career was cut short when she was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, has died. She was 96.

Taylor, who received screen credit as Anne Froelick, died of natural causes Jan. 26 in a nursing home in Los Angeles, said her daughter, Priscilla Taylor Stephens.

A onetime model and actress in New York City, Taylor began her writing career in 1938 while serving as secretary to Howard Koch, then a writer for Orson Welles' "The Mercury Theatre on the Air."

Koch "soon began giving me dialogue to write and some of the scenes, and he encouraged me to be creative," Taylor said in an interview for the 1997 book "Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist," an oral history by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle.

Taylor also assisted Koch on his adaptation of H.G. Wells "The War of the Worlds" for "The Mercury Theatre on the Air," which made radio history when it was broadcast in 1938.

When Koch went to work as a writer at Warner Bros., he wanted the studio to hire Taylor as a writer. But, she recalled, Warner Bros. said she would have to start as Koch's secretary and would be promoted to writer after six months. It took 18 months.

After helping Koch on the psychological themes and rewriting some of the scenes for his screenplay for the 1940 Bette Davis crime drama "The Letter," Warner Bros. signed Taylor to a writing contract.

"So many of the women who were writing at that time didn't get credit on things they worked on," said her daughter. "It was really a big push by women in those days to get credit for the work they did."

Taylor's first screen credit was the 1941 drama "Shining Victory," which she co-wrote with Koch.Four other Froelick writing credits followed: "The Master Race" (1944), "Miss Susie Slagle's" (1946), "Easy Come, Easy Go" (1947) and "Harriet Craig." Taylor's involvement in left-wing causes, such as fighting against fascism and promoting unions and desegregation, had led her to join the Communist Party, her daughter said.

In 1951, Taylor's party membership caused her husband, Philip Taylor, to lose his job as a manufacturing planner at Lockheed.

"He was escorted out of the plant by two guards," Taylor's daughter said. "I think it was to make a public display, which is what they were doing all over to frighten people. Interestingly, my mother hadn't gotten work [as a writer] from 1950 to '53, so she feared she was sort of covertly blacklisted, not blatantly blacklisted."

On the last day of the House Un-American Activities Committee's last visit to Hollywood in 1953, two fellow screenwriters named Taylor as a Communist.

"Then," her daughter said of the blacklist, "it was official."

Taylor continued to try to make a living as a writer using her married name. She wrote four plays that were produced locally, including "Storm in the Sun." And she co-wrote a comic novel, "Press on Regardless," with Fern Mosk, which was published by Simon and Schuster in 1956.

She also did some anonymous editing and writing for a friend who wrote soap operas, Laura Olsher."But she never was able to fully recover and make a living at it," said her daughter.

In an interview Monday, Buhle said the blacklisted Taylor "symbolized an era of lost opportunities."

"She was one of those people whose career barely started when it ended," he said.

Born Dec. 8, 1913, in Hinsdale, Mass, she grew up in Princeton, N.J., and briefly attended Smith College before moving to New York City at 19 to try to start an acting career.

Besides her daughter Priscilla, Taylor is survived by another daughter, Frolic Taylor; and two grandchildren.

A memorial service is pending.

[movieman1957]

While we're at it... Producer David Brown.
(from WBAL in Baltimore.)

Acclaimed Movie Producer Dead

Monday, February 01, 2010
John Patti

David Brown, whose legendary career as a movie producer and executive spanned six decades, included four Academy Award nominations and produced smash box office hits like Oscar winners The Sting and Jaws, along with popular classics like Cocoon and Driving Miss Daisy, died Monday at his home in Manhattan after a long illness. He was 93.

Married for more than 50 years to Cosmopolitan magazine editor and author Helen Gurley Brown, Brown and his wife have been celebrated as anchors of both the Hollywood film and New York publishing communities.

Before heading to Hollywood to join the film industry in 1951, Brown enjoyed a successful career as a journalist, including a stint as managing editor of Cosmopolitan, which his wife later made famous as its editor-in-chief.

A prolific writer, Brown also authored a number of books, including his most recent, in 2006, Brown’s Guide to the Good Life Without Tears, Fears or Boredom.

“David Brown was a force in the entertainment, literary and journalism worlds,” said Frank A. Bennack, Jr., vice chairman and chief executive officer of Hearst Corporation. “We are very lucky at Hearst to have worked with him and his legendary wife, Helen, for many years. His expansive body of work will be enjoyed by people around the world for many centuries to come. He will be greatly missed.”

Along the way, Brown brought Elvis Presley to the big screen for the first time in Love Me Tender, launched director Steven Spielberg’s career, and is credited with talking George C. Scott into playing Patton.

Born in New York City on July 28, 1916 to Edward Fisher Brown and Lillian Baren Brown, the film producer who would go on to, as one interviewer put it, “make half of Hollywood famous,” went west to Stanford University intending to be a physicist.

Quickly discovering that physics and higher math weren’t his strong suits, Brown majored in what he described as “the softest discipline I could think of, which was journalism.” He graduated from Stanford in 1936 and headed home to New York to earn his master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University the following year.

After apprenticeships in the 1930s at a San Francisco newspaper and The Wall Street Journal, Brown became a copy editor and theater critic at Women’s Wear Daily. He then edited magazines, a job that at Cosmopolitan included penning attention-grabbing cover lines. He returned to that job later in life as an unpaid staff husband, writing the cover lines for then-Helen Gurley Brown’s magazine.

Brown also wrote short stories and articles for national magazines like Collier’s, Harper’s, The New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post and for The New York Times. The future movie mogul held editorial positions at the Milk Research Council and the American Medical Association, and served as a first lieutenant with U.S. Army Military Intelligence during World War II.

With his eclectic journalism résumé and a clear sense of narrative, Brown caught the eye of legendary Hollywood studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck, who hired him in 1951 to head the story department at 20th Century Fox. To prepare for his second move west, Brown, who then preferred plays to movies, had to take what he called “a crash course in movie going.”

From 1952 to 1971, Brown rose in Fox’s executive ranks, surviving two firings, one of which briefly took him to Warner Bros., where he was executive vice president and a member of the board of directors. Twice divorced, he married Helen Gurley, then an advertising copywriter in Los Angeles, on September 25, 1959. While at Fox, Brown began his longtime friendship with Richard Zanuck, son of Darryl.

In 1972, Brown and Richard Zanuck formed their independent Zanuck-Brown production company. Until they dissolved the company in 1988, the Zanuck-Brown team consistently produced films that packed theaters. One of their first, The Sting, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1974.

That year, the team launched Steven Spielberg’s directing career with his first feature film, The Sugarland Express, and went on to hire him for Jaws.

According to Brown, Spielberg at first didn’t want to do the 1975 flick about a giant shark terrorizing beachgoers in a summer resort town.

“He said, ‘There are movies and there are films, and I want to make films.’ And we said, ‘Well if this works, you can make films.’” The movie was such a smash hit that it led to the now-standard “summer blockbuster” release and helped launch Spielberg’s extraordinary industry success. Brown and Zanuck produced its sequel in 1978.

The pair went on to produce more films, including director Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict (1982), Ron Howard’s Cocoon (1985), and Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), which won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Picture.

Brown received numerous career honors over the years, including the prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1990 and the David O. Selznick Lifetime Achievement Award from the Producers Guild of America in 1995. Other honors included the IFP Gotham Award in 1993, the ShowEast Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998, the Writers Guild of America (East) Evelyn F. Burkey Award in 1999 and ShoWest Producer of the Year in 2001.

In 1988, Brown founded and became president of his own production company, The Manhattan Project Ltd., continuing his success with such films as A Few Good Men (1992), Deep Impact (1998, with Richard Zanuck), and Angela's Ashes (1999).

Other Brown successes were Kiss the Girls (1997), The Saint (1997), Along Came a Spider (2001), and Road to Perdition (2002). He received another Best Picture Oscar nomination as producer of Chocolat in 2001.

Once asked how he’d commanded Hollywood without making enemies or succumbing to its excesses, Brown said, “I keep my word, even when I make a mistake. I never lived beyond my means, and therefore, I never had to be a slave to Hollywood. I always had this feeling that I could go back to journalism. Unlike many Hollywood people, I had another career.”

A highly versatile and insightful producer, Brown was equally adept with stage and small screen productions and with movies. He produced the stage musical adaptation of Sweet Smell of Success, which opened in Chicago in 2001 before moving to New York in 2002. He also brought to the New York stage such notable plays as: Tru (1989-90), A Few Good Men (1989-91), The Cemetery Club (1990), and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (2005). Brown was also executive producer of a 1996 CBS miniseries, A Season in Purgatory, and two movies for HBO.

Brown appeared as himself in numerous film and television documentaries on Hollywood subjects ranging from Marilyn Monroe and Darryl F. Zanuck to the stories behind watershed films like Gentleman’s Agreement, M*A*S*H and Jaws.

He remained a writer long after he left journalism, penning nonfiction books and editing others.

A Yale University student interviewer once asked Brown what he looked for in material to produce. Always the writer, he answered: “What you look for when you read a good book: what moves you. Something that makes you feel great, that absorbs you, that when you put it down you say, ‘I’ve got to call the agent, I hope I’m not too late.’ It’s subjective, it’s falling in love.”

His sole survivor is his wife.

A public funeral will be held on Thursday, February 4 at 3:30 p.m. at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel (1076 Madison Avenue at 81st Street) in New York C

[Lzcutter]

A number of Zanuck/Brown films from the 1970s are some of my favorite films.

[klondike]

In Memoriam

With all the sadness and trauma going on in the world at the moment, it is worth reflecting on the death of a very important person, which almost went unnoticed last week.
Larry LaPrise, the man who wrote "The Hokey Pokey", died peacefully at age 93.
The most traumatic part for his family was getting him into the coffin.
They put his left leg in . . and then the trouble started...
(Yeah, I know, the anal retentive among us will wonder why I didn't put this in the "Sailor Walks Into" thread . . I'm only glad they have something to think about today . . . )

[moira finnie]

Johnny Seven, a familiar character actor in everything from On the Waterfront to The Apartment to Ironside, has died at age 83. Born the son of Italian immigrants who named him John Anthony Fetto in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn in 1926, he went from boy soprano to portraying some very tough characters, but he managed to bring some individuality and a certain warmth to normally cliched roles over the course of a long career.

Here is the account of his career that appeared in The Hollywood Reporter under Mike Barnes byline:

Johnny Seven, who appeared in 26 films and 600 television shows during a prolific four-decade career, died Jan. 22 of complications from lung cancer at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, Calif. He was 83.

Seven portrayed Lt. Carl Reese on 30 episodes of NBC's 1968-75 "Ironside" series and played Shirley MacLaine's brother, Karl Matuschka, in Billy Wilder's 1960 Oscar-winning film "The Apartment."

Born John Anthony Fetto II in Brooklyn, Seven also appeared in such shows as "Chips," "Naked City," "The Untouchables," "Peter Gunn," "Death Valley Days," "Bonanza," "Gunsmoke," "The Phil Silvers Show," "Batman," "The Wild Wild West" and "Charlie's Angels."

Film credits include roles in "The Last Mile" (1959) with Mickey Rooney, "Guns of the Timberland" (1960) with Alan Ladd and Blake Edwards' "What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?" (1966).

Seven, who got his start on the New York stage, co-wrote, directed, produced and starred in the 1964 indie film "Navajo Run."

Survivors include his wife of 60 years, Edith; his son, John Anthony Fetto III; grandson John C. Pollard; and his sisters Terry Guglielmo, Connie Sabatino, Delores Santa Lucia and Jean Loy.

A memorial service will be held at 11:30 a.m. on Feb. 6 at St. John Baptist de La Salle Parish in Granada Hills. Donations can be made to the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis.

[Lzcutter]

Kathryn Grayson has died.

Kathryn Grayson, whose beauty and lilting soprano brightened MGM musicals of the 1940s and 1950s including "Anchors Aweigh," "Show Boat," "The Desert Song" and "Kiss Me Kate," has died. She was 88.

Grayson died Wednesday of natural causes at her Los Angeles home, said the actress' longtime companion and secretary, Sally Sherman.

Grayson's youthful ambition was to sing opera, but she wasn't able to accomplish that dream until after her movie career ended. While still a teenager, she was placed under contract at MGM at a time when the studio was assembling a stable of musical talent that would dominate the era of great musicals.

"I thought they were wasting their time and money," Grayson recalled of her first days at the studio. "I even told (studio boss) Louis B. Mayer that. He said he knew a lot more than a 16-year-old girl who is and who isn't good material for pictures.

"He offered a deal: I would make a screen test, and if the studio liked the test, I would shut up forever. If not, I would go.

"It was the longest test in motion picture history. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars; it was almost a two-reeler .... The studio liked it. I told Mr. Mayer I didn't like it. He went home with a heart attack."

Concerned, Grayson agreed to stay, and she turned down an offer to sing "Lucia" at the Metropolitan Opera. She later learned that Mayer had two ploys to persuade recalcitrant actors: to cry or to claim a heart attack.

Like Lana Turner, Esther Williams, Donna Reed and other MGM newcomers, Grayson was given a tryout as Mickey Rooney's sweetheart in the studio's popular Hardy Family series. She played the title role in "Andy Hardy's Private Secretary" and sang Strauss's "Voices of Spring." Mayer was convinced that he had a future star.

She was cast in three minor films, including a musical with Abbot and Costello, then played Gene Kelly's girlfriend in a wartime revue that included major MGM stars, "Thousands Cheer."

"Anchors Aweigh," a 1945 hit with Kelly and Frank Sinatra, confirmed her star status. Her bell-like soprano made her the ideal co-star with Hollywood's full-voiced male singers in operettas and other musicals.. She made three films with Howard Keel, two with Mario Lanza, one with Gordon MacRae.

Normally she was the most congenial of actresses during filming, but she did have one public flare-up with the temperamental Lanza. He lit the fire when he told an interviewer: "I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Kathryn because she was in my first two pictures."

She took offense because she believed as an established MGM star, they were her pictures. She told an interviewer she objected to Lanza's behavior on the set, especially his vulgar language.

She was born Zelma Kathryn Hedrick on Feb. 9, 1922, in Winston-Salem, N.C., her father a building contractor and realtor. Because of his business, the family moved frequently, finally settling in St. Louis, Mo. Her parents recognized her gifted voice and arranged an audition before opera star Frances Marshall. She encouraged the girl to continue her music lessons.

The family moved to Los Angeles so Kathryn could have more professional training. She came to the attention of Mayer, who had been searching for a lovely young soprano to rival Universal's sensational Deanna Durbin (Durbin had been under contract to MGM, but she was dropped in favor of Judy Garland).

When the newly named Kathryn Grayson sang two arias in "Andy Hardy's Private Secretary," Mayer realized he had a new star. Among her musicals: "Two Sisters from Boston," "Ziegfeld Follies," "Till the Clouds Roll By," "That Midnight Kiss," "The Toast of New Orleans," "Show Boat," "Lovely to Look At," "Kiss Me Kate," "The Desert Song" and "So This Is Love" (as Grace Moore).

Her last film, "The Vagabond King" in 1956, soured her on movies. She was scheduled to be reunited with Lanza, but he pulled one of his characteristic no-shows. An unknown Oreste Kirkpop (billed only as Oreste), was a last-minute substitution. "He couldn't speak English, so the director, Mike Curtiz, told me to speak his lines. `But I'm not Francois Villon,' I said. `It doesn't matter,' said Mike." Oreste's lines were dubbed.

"It never should have been made," she told an interviewer. "(Composer) Rudolf Friml was so upset about it that he told Paramount he was going out of town for the weekend. He went to Hong Kong."

Her film career over, Grayson remained active. She realized her long-held ambition to sing in opera, and she also starred in productions of "The Merry Widow," "Rosalinda," Naughty Marietta," and "Camelot." She and Howard Keel toured extensively in "Man of La Mancha" and appeared together in Las Vegas. She sang concerts in Australia and appeared in a one-woman show of film clips and reminiscences.

She was married and divorced MGM contract players John Shelton (1940-1946) and Johnny Johnston (1947-1951). The marriage to Johnston produced her only child, Patricia Kathryn. Grayson never remarried.

In a 1988 interview Grayson remarked that she had given up writing her memoirs because it wouldn't be the "kiss and tell" kind the publishers wanted.

"I'm a Pollyanna," she confessed. "I had to stop writing because I love everybody and I was saying everyone was beautiful. I just happen to think people are pretty wonderful."

[mrsl]

.
What a lovely lady and a lovely attitude. A lot of people, for some reason, don't like her, but I always did. I still think her Showboat is the best one made. I've missed her for years in musicals, and now I'll simply miss her.
.

[JackFavell]

I agree, mrsl. It's nice that Grayson's personality matched their looks.

[feaito]

Sad news. She'll be missed. She starred in my second favorite musical of all time, the fantastic "Kiss Me Kate" (1953). She was also a real beauty and one of the most feminine and delicate women of her time. Rest in peace wonderful Ms. Grayson.

[jdb1]

Seems that the Rule of Threes is kicking in -- venerable British character actor Lionel Jeffries has passed, at age 83:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/02 ... .html?_r=1

[klondike]

How sad, Judith: the sun has set for the First Man in the Moon!

[charliechaplinfan]

Two other links with the past gone. I liked Kathryn Grayson too. Lionel Jeffries will be forever remembered by me in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

[jdb1]

And a third passing: Former Presidential Chief of Staff, NATO Supreme Commander, and Secretary of State, Gen. Alexander ("Read your constitution, buddy!") Haig has passed away.