October 15, 1915: The Supreme Court finds Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company guilty of restraint of trade against the independents, spelling the trust’s doom.
October 10, 1939: Babes in Arms, the first in a popular quartet of Busby Berkeley musicals teaming Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, opens.
October 12, 1940: Famed screen cowboy Tom Mix, 60, is killed in an automobile accident while driving through Arizona.
October 15, 1940: “Chaplin Speaks” as Adenoid Hynkel, ruler of Tomania, in his satire on Hitler’s rise to power, The Great Dictator.
October 11, 1944: Gene Tierney creates a memorable portrait of seductive danger in the film noir classic Laura, directed by Otto Preminger.
October 11, 1944: “You know how to whistle, don’t you?,” Lauren Bacall asks future husband Humphrey Bogart in their first movie together, To Have and Have Not.
October 11, 1955: The landmark musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma!, filmed in both a CinemaScope and a Todd-AO version, is released.
October 12, 1958: At the Brussels World’s Fair, an international panel of 117 cinema historians votes The Battleship Potemkin the best film of all time.
October 14, 1959: Errol Flynn, roguish star of Warner Bros. action classics through the ’30s and ’40s, dies of a heart attack at age 50.
October 10, 1961: Warren Beatty, who has starred on TV and on Broadway, makes an impressive film debut in Splendor in the Grass, co-starring Natalie Wood.
October 14, 1972: Director Bernardo Bertolucci‘s steamy Last Tango in Paris premieres at the New York Film Festival amid great controversy.
October 12, 1978: Rival Chicago film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel take their local show nationwide with the debut of Sneak Previews on PBS.
October 10, 1985: “Boy Wonder” actor/writer/director Orson Welles dies of a heart attack at 70.
October 12, 1994: Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg announce the formation of Dreamworks SKG, the first major studio in over 50 years.