This Week in Film History: 11/29/15

December 1, 1903Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, the first motion picture to use intercutting scenes to form a unified narrative, is released.

December 2, 1910: Hefty funnyman John Bunny, the cinema’s first comedy star, makes his debut in Vitagraph’s Jack Fat and Jim Slim at Coney Island.

December 4, 1924: Greed, previewed in a nine-hour, 42-reel version earlier in the year, opens in a studio-mandated 10-reel cut that director Erich von Stroheim disavows.

December 4, 1925: A bureau known as the Central Casting Corporation is set up by the major Hollywood studios as a pool of extras available to film productions.

December 3, 1927: While they had appeared in other films independently, the silent short Putting Pants on Philip marks the first pairing of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy as a team.

December 1, 1938: The first movie with an “all-midget cast,” the B-western The Terror of Tiny Town, opens to a Lilliputian box office.

November 29, 1939: The legendary rivalry between gossip queens Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons begins when Parsons is scooped on the divorce of James Roosevelt.

December 2, 1939Humphrey Bogart’s sole entry in the horror genre, The Return of Doctor X, opens.

November 30, 1940: Up-and-coming actress Lucille Ball marries musician Desi Arnaz in Connecticut. From the nearly 20-year union would come two kids, a pair of films, and the TV classic I Love Lucy.

November 30, 1942: B-western star Buck Jones dies from injuries sustained in a fire two days earlier at Boston’s Cocoanut Grove nightclub that claimed 491 lives.

November 30, 1947: German-born director Ernst Lubitsch (Ninotchka) dies of a heart attack at 55.

November 30, 1952: The first 3-D color feature, Bwana Devil, debuts and launches the ‘50s 3-D film craze.

December 2, 1960: After two decades of marriage, Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier file for divorce. The couple would officially separate two months later.

December 4, 1967: Bert Lahr, stage and film comedian best known as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, dies at 72.

December 5, 1976: Bound for Glory, the first film to take advantage of Garret Brown’s Steadicam, a device which stabilizes handheld cameras, is released.

November 30, 1979: The last surviving Marx Brother, youngest sibling Herbert (Zeppo), dies at his California home at 78.

November 29, 1981: Actress Natalie Wood, 43, drowns during a weekend boating trip near California’s Santa Catalina Island.

December 2, 1982: Cockeyed British funnyman Marty Feldman (Young Frankenstein) dies at 49.

November 29, 1986: The epitome of Hollywood sophistication and suaveness, Cary Grant, dies at 82 while taking part in an Iowa film festival.

December 2, 1988: The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, starring Leslie Nielsen and based on a short-lived TV series, opens.

December 2, 1997: Good Will Hunting, starring co-writers Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, had its Hollywood premiere today. How do you like them apples?

November 30, 2013: Paul Walker, 40, co-star of the Fast and Furious action film series, is killed in a California car crash.