March 18, 1910: An important entry in the nascent horror genre is the Edison Company’s Frankenstein, with stage veteran Charles Ogle as the monster. March 13, 1934: Walt Disney, accepting his prize for The Three Little Pigs, is the first…
Read more →Articles by: Jay Steinberg
Natalie Wood: Let Me Entertain You
This doe-eyed brunette beauty followed up a successful stint as a child star with a run as one of Hollywood’s most popular female leads of the ’60s, rendering a series of noteworthy performances as emotionally fragile young women. Born in San…
Read more →This Week In Film History, 03.06.11
March 10, 1910: D.W. Griffith launches the Hollywood film industry with In Old California, the first film to be made in the new municipality. March 10, 1922: Hollywood hires former postmaster general Will H. Hays to oversee “moral and artistic…
Read more →Anthony Quinn: Hollywood’s Man of the World
The versatility and sheer verve that marked the man informed his craftwork as well, and allowed this Irish-Mexican performer to forge a remarkable 60-plus-year run onscreen as lead and character player. Born in Chihuahua, Mexico in 1915, Antonio Rudolfo Oaxaca…
Read more →This Week In Film History, 02.27.11
March 2, 1906: Biograph Studios wins appeal of kinetoscope inventor Edison’s patent claims, preventing (temporarily) a potential monopoly on the making of movies. March 5, 1919: Pioneering black producer/director Oscar Micheaux releases his first film, The Homesteader. February 27, 1920:…
Read more →This Week In Film History, 02.20.11
February 25, 1906: Future Universal Pictures president Carl Laemmle enters the moving pictures business with Chicago’s first nickelodeon, the White Front Theater. February 22, 1934: A Depression-weary American public flocks to Frank Capra‘s comedy It Happened One Night, starring Claudette…
Read more →This Week In Film History, 02.13.11
February 18, 1913: The Edison Film Co. introduces its synchronized film-phonograph Kinetoscope process for showing “sound films” in New York. February 14, 1927: Director Alfred Hitchcock first tries his hand at suspense with The Lodger, based on the Jack the…
Read more →This Week In Film History, 02.06.11
February 8, 1915: D.W. Griffith‘s Civil War epic, The Birth of a Nation, opens. At a White House screening, President Woodrow Wilson calls it “like writing history with lightning.” February 8, 1926: The New York Sun is the first to…
Read more →This Week In Film History, 01.30.11
February 2, 1922: Hollywood has a real whodunit on its hands when Paramount Pictures director William Desmond Taylor is found slain. February 5, 1927: Buster Keaton‘s comedic masterwork The General, based on a true Civil War incident, is released. February…
Read more →This Week In Film History, 01.23.11
January 27, 1918: Edgar Rice Burroughs’ jungle lord debuts on screen in Tarzan of the Apes, starring former Arkansas peace officer Elmo Lincoln. January 23, 1932: Educational Films Corporation signs 3 ½-year-old Shirley Temple to appear in a series of…
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