Who's Next To Croak?

Started by cine, September 28, 2003, 11:07:39 AM

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Reinhold

Quote from: Pas Rap on April 23, 2010, 07:29:06 AM
Obviously what you are doing right now is called (in my upcoming book of psychology at least) validation. I think it's a normal thing to do. People will reply, say anything, and then you're gonna do what you were subconsciently thinking of doing all along.

polkablues

They must be behind the naked girls.
My house, my rules, my coffee

MacGuffin

Fashion company founder Liz Claiborne dies at 78

Liz ClaiborneFashion designer Liz Claiborne, whose styles became a cornerstone of career women's wardrobes in the 1970s and 1980s, has died, the company she founded said today. She was 78.

Claiborne died Tuesday at the New York Presbyterian Hospital after suffering from cancer for a number of years, said Gwen Satterfield, personal assistant to Claiborne.

Claiborne founded Liz Claiborne Inc. in 1976 along with her husband Art Ortenberg and Leonard Boxer. Their goal was to create a collection of fashions aimed at the growing number of women entering the work force.

The new approach to dressing revolutionized the department store industry, which had only focused on stocking pants in one department and skirts in another.

The clothes became an instant hit, and the company went public in 1981. By 1985, Liz Claiborne Inc. was the first company founded by a woman to be listed in the Fortune 500, according to the company's Web site. The company, whose brands now include Ellen Tracy, Dana Buchman and Juicy Couture, generated sales of almost $5 billion last year.

Liz Claiborne retired from the day-to-day operations in 1989.

"In losing Liz Claiborne, we have not only lost the founder of our company, but an inspirational woman who revolutionized the fashion industry 30 years ago," said Bill McComb, CEO of Liz Claiborne, in a statement. "Her commitment to style and design is ever present in our thinking and the way we work. We will remember Liz for her vision, her entrepreneurial spirit and her enduring compassion and generosity."

Of the original founders, Boxer retired from the company in 1985 and Claiborne and her husband retired in 1989. There have been a number of changes since then. Jerry Chazen, the fourth original partner, became the company's chairman in 1989.

Paul R. Charron succeeded Chazen in the mid-1990s, and spearheaded an aggressive campaign to acquire different labels to diversify beyond the company's namesake brands, which struggled with increased competition.

Last November, McComb joined the company as CEO, succeeding Charron, and is planning to overhaul the business again to meet the demands of the consolidated department store industry.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

I Don't Believe in Beatles

Good Morning America movie critic Joel Siegel dies from cancer

NEW YORK -- Joel Siegel, a longtime movie critic for WABC-TV and "Good Morning America" who racked up five New York Emmy Awards for his insightful work, died Friday, the television station said. He was 63.

The station said Siegel, who was famous for his weekly reviews, had been battling colon cancer.

"Joel was an important part of ABC News and we will miss him," ABC News President David Westin said in a release. "He was a brilliant reviewer and a great reporter. But much more, he was our dear friend and colleague. Our thoughts and prayers are with Joel's family."

Siegel was known for his sense of humor, movie acumen and sharp judgment. He never let an actor off the hook if the performance was lackluster.

"The appeal of Matthew McConaughey has long evaded me both as a pinup and as an actor," Siegel opined in his review of "We are Marshall," a 2006 film. "His constant ticks, bad hair and strained syntax as a coach fumble what should have been the tragic and inspirational story of the rebuilding of Marshall University's football team after a devastating plane crash."

Dave Davis, president and general manager of WABC-TV, said the critic loved to poke at uninspiring movies.

"No one had more fun writing about a bad movie than Joel," Davis said.

ABC anchor Charles Gibson said Siegel knew how to tell a story.

"He had an inexhaustible supply of stories _ most funny, many poignant, all with a point or a punch line," Gibson said.

Born in Los Angeles on July 7, 1943, Siegel graduated cum laude from UCLA. After college, he started writing for The Los Angeles Times, where he reviewed books.

He landed in the Big Apple in 1972 and worked as a reporter for WCBS-TV. He also hosted "Joel Siegel's New York" on WCBS Radio. Four years later, he jumped to WABC-TV, cementing his reputation as a film critic over the next three decades.

In 1981, he joined "Good Morning America" and became a regular as the network's entertainment editor, easily recognizable by his thick mustache and glasses.

In addition to Emmy Awards, he also received a public service award from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith; and the New York State Associated Press Broadcasters Association Award for general excellence in individual reporting.

He survived by his son, Dylan, and wife, Ena Swansea.
"A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later." --Stanley Kubrick

Ravi

Quote from: Ginger on June 29, 2007, 07:15:21 PM
Good Morning America movie critic Joel Siegel dies from cancer

Kevin Smith is currently being interrogated.

I Don't Believe in Beatles

Taiwanese Director Yang Dies at 59

HONG KONG -- Edward Yang, who won best director in 2000 at the Cannes Film Festival and was known for his realistic portrayals of modern Taiwan, has died of complications from colon cancer, a film industry consultant said Sunday. He was 59.

Yang, an American citizen, died at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. on Friday, Norman Wang told The Associated Press. Wang said Yang's family asked him to release the information to the media.

Yang had been battling colon cancer for seven years but kept his illness private, Wang said.

Born in Shanghai in 1947, his family moved from mainland China to Taiwan amid civil war waged by the communists following the retreat by the ruling Nationalists, according to his biography in the book "Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers."

The multitalented Yang took a convoluted path to filmmaking.

Pursuing what was considered a prestigious career in Taiwan, he studied engineering on the island, received a master's degree at the University of Florida and worked as a computer engineer before becoming a filmmaker.

"On my 30th birthday, I suddenly said to myself, 'Damn, I'm getting old!' I realized that I had to change my life. I needed to start doing something that I could enjoy and through which I could feel fulfilled," he once said in an interview.

Yang favored stories set in the Taiwanese capital, Taipei. Among his works are "A Brighter Summer Day," a 1991 film set in 1950s Taipei about Elvis-worshipping teenage boys who get involved with gangsters.

The film was viewed as a major incubator of Taiwanese movie talent and an important documentation of the island's history under authoritarian Nationalist rule. One character is shown being questioned by Taiwanese police in the middle of the night, common treatment at the time for locals suspected of communist sympathies.

Among the many first-time movie professionals who worked on "A Brighter Summer Day" was Taiwanese actor Chang Chen who went on to star in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," the Ang Lee kung fu hit.

"He was my inspirational teacher in performance and one of the directors I respect the most," Chang was quoted as saying on Sunday by the Chinese news Web site Sina.com.

Yang won best director at Cannes in 2000 for "Yi Yi (A One and a Two)," about a Taiwanese family that copes with the serious illness of their elderly mother.

He is survived by his wife, concert pianist Kaili Peng, his 6-year-old son Sean, a younger sister and a brother.
"A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later." --Stanley Kubrick

grand theft sparrow

I cannot even begin to explain how utterly crushed I am by this.

Sunrise

I saw this last night...just an absolute tragedy.

bonanzataz

RALEIGH, N.C. - Tammy Faye Messner, who as Tammy Faye Bakker helped her husband, Jim, build a multimillion-dollar evangelism empire and then watched it collapse in disgrace, has died. She was 65.
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Messner had battled colon cancer since 1996 that more recently spread to her lungs. She died peacefully Friday at her home near Kansas City, Mo., said Joe Spotts, her manager and booking agent.

A family service was held Saturday in a private cemetery, where her ashes were interred, he said.

She had frequently spoken about her medical problems, saying she hoped to be an inspiration to others. "Don't let fear rule your life," she said. "Live one day at a time, and never be afraid." But she told well-wishers in a note on her Web site in May that the doctors had stopped trying to treat the cancer.

In an interview with CNN's Larry King two months later, an emaciated Messner — still using her trademark makeup — said, "I believe when I leave this earth, because I love the Lord, I'm going straight to heaven." Asked if she had any regrets, Messner said: "I don't think about it, Larry, because it's a waste of good brain space."

For many, the TV image of then-Mrs. Bakker forgiving husband Jim's infidelities, tears streaking her cheeks with mascara, became a symbol for the wages of greed and hypocrisy in 1980s America.

She divorced her husband of 30 years, with whom she had two children, in 1992 while he was in prison for defrauding millions from followers of their PTL television ministries. The letters stood for "Praise the Lord" or "People that Love."

Jim Bakker said in a statement that his ex-wife "lived her life like the song she sang, 'If Life Hands You a Lemon, Make Lemonade.'"

"She is now in Heaven with her mother and grandmother and Jesus Christ, the one who she loves and has served from childbirth," he said. "That is the comfort I can give to all who loved her."

Messner's second husband also served time in prison. She married Roe Messner, who had been the chief builder of the Bakkers' Heritage USA Christian theme park near Fort Mill, S.C., in 1993. In 1995, he was convicted of bankruptcy fraud, and he spent about two years in prison.

Through it all, Messner kept plugging her faith and herself. She did concerts, a short-lived secular TV talk show and an inspirational videotape. In 2004, she cooperated in the making of a documentary about her struggle with cancer, called "Tammy Faye: Death Defying."

"I wanted to help people ... maybe show the inside (of the experience) and make it a little less frightening," she said.

More recently, Tammy Faye kept in the public eye via her Web site.

"I cry out to the Lord knowing that many of you are praying for me," Messner wrote in a July 16 post in which she indicated she weighed 65 pounds. "In spite of it all, I get dressed and go out to eat. ... I crave hamburgers and french fries with LOTS of ketchup! When I can eat that again, it will be a day of victory!"

In 2004, she appeared on the WB reality show "The Surreal Life," co-starring with rapper Vanilla Ice, ex-porn star Ron Jeremy and others. She told King in 2004 that she didn't know who Jeremy was when they met and they became friends.

Messner was never charged with a crime in connection with the Bakker scandal. She said she counted the costs in other ways.

"I know what it's like to hit rock bottom," she said in promotional material for her 1996 video "You Can Make It."

In the mid-1980s, the Bakkers were on top, ruling over a ministry that claimed 500,000 followers. Their "Jim and Tammy Show," part TV talk show, part evangelism meeting, was seen across the country. Heritage USA boasted a 500-room hotel, shopping mall, convention center, water-amusement park, TV studio and several real-estate developments. PTL employed about 2,000 people.

Then in March 1987, Bakker resigned, admitting he had a tryst with Jessica Hahn, a 32-year-old former church secretary.

Tammy Faye Bakker stuck with her disgraced husband through five stormy years of tabloid headlines as the ministry unraveled.

Prosecutors said the PTL organization sold more than 150,000 "lifetime partnerships" promising lodging at the theme park but did not build enough hotel space with the $158 million in proceeds. At his fraud trial, Jim Bakker was accused of diverting $3.7 million to personal use even though he knew the ministry was financially shaky. Trial testimony showed PTL paid $265,000 to Hahn to cover up the sexual encounter with the minister.

Jim Bakker was convicted in 1989 of 24 fraud and conspiracy counts and sentenced to 45 years. The sentence was later reduced, and he was freed in 1994. He said that his wife's decision to leave him had been "like a meat hook deep in my heart. I couldn't eat for days."

While not charged, his then-wife shared during the 1980s in the public criticism and ridicule over the couple's extravagance, including the reportedly gold-plated bathroom fixtures and an air-conditioned doghouse.

There was even a popular T-shirt satirizing her image. The shirt read, "I ran into Tammy Faye at the shopping mall," with the lettering on top of what look like clots of mascara, traces of lipstick and smudges of peach-toned makeup.

In a 1992 letter to her New Covenant Church in Orlando, Fla., she explained why she finally was seeking a divorce.

"For years I have been pretending that everything is all right, when in fact I hurt all the time," she wrote.

"I cannot pretend anymore."

In the end, there wasn't any property to divide, her attorney said. The Bakkers lost their luxury homes in North Carolina, California and Tennessee, their fleet of Cadillacs and Mercedeses, and their vintage Rolls-Royce.

Her autobiography, "I Gotta Be Me," recounts a childhood as Tammy Faye LaValley, one of eight children of a poor family in International Falls, Minn. Her biological father walked out. She was reticent about her age, but a 2000 profile of her in the Star Tribune of Minneapolis said she was born in March 1942.

She recalled trying eye makeup for the first time, then wiping it off for fear it was the devil's work. Then she thought again.

"Why can't I do this?" she asked. "If it makes me look prettier, why can't I do this?"

She married Bakker in 1961, after they met at North Central Bible College in Minneapolis. Beginning with a children's puppet act, they created a religious show that brought a fundamentalist Protestant message to millions.

A secular TV talk program, the "Jim J. and Tammy Faye Show" with co-host Jim J. Bullock, lasted just six weeks in early 1996. Shortly after it went off the air, she underwent surgery for colon cancer.

She said afterward that she endured bleeding for a year because she was embarrassed to go to a male doctor. And she wore her makeup even in surgery.

"They didn't make me take it off," she said. "I had wonderful doctors and understanding nurses. I went in fully made up and came out fully made up."

Survivors include her husband and her two children, Jamie Charles Bakker of New York City and Tammy Sue Chapman of Charlotte.

Spotts said that the family is considering a public memorial service for the coming weeks, but that nothing had been finalized Saturday.







sad...
The corpses all hang headless and limp bodies with no surprises and the blood drains down like devil's rain we'll bathe tonight I want your skulls I need your skulls I want your skulls I need your skulls Demon I am and face I peel to see your skin turned inside out, 'cause gotta have you on my wall gotta have you on my wall, 'cause I want your skulls I need your skulls I want your skulls I need your skulls collect the heads of little girls and put 'em on my wall hack the heads off little girls and put 'em on my wall I want your skulls I need your skulls I want your skulls I need your skulls

Stefen

I remember watching her on that surreal life tv show with Ron Jeremy and Vanilla Ice. She seemed like just a really nice, sweet, caring person.

That's too bad.
Falling in love is the greatest joy in life. Followed closely by sneaking into a gated community late at night and firing a gun into the air.

MacGuffin

Cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs dies at 74

Laszlo Kovacs, one of Hollywood's most influential and respected directors of photography, died Saturday night in his sleep. He was 74.

Kovacs lensed the landmark cinematic achievement "Easy Rider" and compiled about 60 credits including "Five Easy Pieces," "Shampoo," "Paper Moon," "New York, New York," "What's Up, Doc," "Ghostbusters," "My Best Friend's Wedding" and "Miss Congeniality."

The Hungary-born cinematographer also carried during his career a remarkable story of courage that occurred 50 years ago during his country's revolution.

Kovacs was born and raised on a farm in Hungary when that country was isolated from the Western world, first by the Nazi occupation and later during the Cold War. Kovacs was in his final year of school in Budapest when a revolt against the communist regime started on the city streets.

He and his lifelong friend Vilmos Zsigmond made the daring decision to document the event for its historic significance. To do this, they borrowed film and a camera from their school, hid the camera in a paper bag with a hole for the lens and recorded the conflict.
 
The pair then embarked on a dangerous journey during which they carried 30,000 feet of documentary film across the border into Austria. They entered the U.S. as political refugees in 1957.

Their historic film was featured in a CBS documentary narrated by Walter Cronkite.

Against the odds, Kovacs and Zsigmond went on to become two of Hollywood's most influential directors of photography.

Kovacs was an active member of the American Society of Cinematographers, and in 2002, he received the ASC Lifetime Achievement Award, the organization's highest honor.

In 1998, he received two lifetime achievement awards for cinematography: one at the Hawaii International Film Festival and one at CamerImage, the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography, in Torun, Poland.

Kovacs was a member of the ASC's board of directors and demonstrated a deep commitment to education by leading the ASC Education Committee.

The 2008 ASC Student Awards will be known as the Laszlo Kovacs Student Heritage Award.

Kovacs is survived by his wife, Audrey, and two daughters, Jullianna and Nadia.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Reinhold

Film Legend Ingmar Bergman Dies at 89

All Things Considered, July 30, 2007 ·

At the beginning of Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film The Seventh Seal, the figure of Death stands on a rocky beach and presents himself to a knight just returned from the Crusades. Death is entirely cloaked and hooded in black, in stark contrast to his doughy white face. The image is still one of the most haunting pictures ever put on a movie screen.

Bergman, who died Monday at the age of 89, took on the biggest subjects — life, death, the existence and the silence of God.

"Ingmar Bergman was probably the nearest equivalent to a Shakespeare or a Rembrandt that the cinema has produced," said film historian and critic Peter Cowie, who is also Bergman's biographer.

"He uniquely was able to produce tragedies, comedies, historical works and chamber works which really delved deeply into the human condition. He really was able to get below the surface of the human mask."

Cowie said that like many great artists, Bergman also had a unifying theme in his work: humanity's need for metaphysical belief.

"It started as orthodox Lutheranism, in some of the films," Cowie said. "But over the years that changed to a much wider, nagging concern about man's place in the universe — why we're here, and if we're here, why aren't we better behaved with each other?"

Bergman often used events and images from his life, and his difficult childhood led him to look at how families malfunction. In a rare television interview with Dick Cavett in 1971, Bergman described a beautiful early childhood of making puppets and living in his imagination.

"Suddenly I didn't know if I had dreamt things, or if they existed," he said. "Sometimes life could be very strange, very hard and very cruel. And suddenly, you know, the parents came to me and said, in a very strange way, 'Why did you do that?' Or — and I didn't know why — or 'You have been lying.'

"That was most difficult thing. I didn't know I had been lying, because I mixed things."

One of the most beautiful examples of mixing dreams and reality comes in Bergman's Wild Strawberries, a film from 1957 that many consider his best. After a hard day of memories and self-evaluation, an aging doctor dreams of seeing his parents across a pond. The scene ends with a close-up of the doctor, played by the venerable Swedish filmmaker Victor Sjostrom. The outdoor light was perfect, but Sjostrom was angry about working overtime. Bergman was sure the shot would be a catastrophe, but it turned out to be his favorite close-up.

"We didn't rehearse — we didn't try it, you know, we didn't press it out," he said. "It was not created under pressure. It just came, suddenly. And that is, that face has so much about experience, about tenderness, about an old man's sadness for life's going away."

Bergman directed some of the greatest films ever made — Summer with Monica, The Virgin Spring, Persona, Cries and Whispers and Scenes from a Marriage were among his other titles. He directed his first film in 1945, and first gained international attention with 1955's Smiles of a Summer Night, a romantic comedy that inspired the Stephen Sondheim musical A Little Night Music.

And although he "officially" retired from theatrical filmmaking in 1984, he continued to make movies for television, to work in the theater — he was also a prominent stage director and the onetime head of Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theater — and to write, until recently.

He was "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera," director Woody Allen said in a 70th birthday tribute in 1988.

Devoted viewers agree that for the past six decades, Bergman's films have defined the possibilities of the art of film.

From NPR reports and The Associated Press




Why Bergman was an artistic giant

Bergman made more than 50 films in a career spanning six decades
Film historian Geoffrey Macnab reflects on the surprisingly versatile career of director Ingmar Bergman, who has died aged 89.

Internationally, Ingmar Bergman is known almost exclusively for his films, but in Sweden he's a huge cultural figure.

He may have made more than 50 films, but he was also extremely active in writing and directing radio plays, he did a lot of work for television, he wrote novels, he wrote scripts.

You could say he has covered every base. On that level alone, that's why he is important.

Bergman's theatre career and film career ran more or less in tandem, and there was a period in the 1950s where he'd be doing theatre work in the winter months, and he would go off in the summer to make films.

It seems as though he had an extraordinary work ethic.

Outside Sweden, people have a vision of Bergman as a very austere figure who made melancholic Scandinavian films about death and doom.

But ironically, his breakthrough film internationally was a comedy - Smiles of a Summer Night.

That was a quintessential summer house farce, which directly influenced Woody Allen's Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy.

You could loosely describe something like The Hour of the Wolf as a horror film - with an artist going mad on an island as he's preyed upon by weird, grotesque aristocratic figures who live in a castle.

And, because of his messy private life, he had to direct a whole bunch of soap advertisements in the 1950s to support his ex-wives and children.

So he was much more versatile than his reputation would suggest.

In Sweden, he found his audience with two films.

There was Scenes From a Marriage, which apparently almost every Swedish couple watched, and which fomented a huge debate on marriage and divorce in Sweden.

It appealed to an older generation who maybe thought his films were too experimental and avant-garde.

For younger viewers, his production of The Magic Flute was the film they loved.

It was shown on Swedish television in the mid-'70s and around half the population watched it.

But, to my mind, he did some of his absolute best work in the 1960s.

Persona is an extraordinary film. It's really an experimental film. It has a lot of weird silent cinema imagery and a distressing montage before the main action begins.

But his reputation was such that even an avant-garde film like that was able to get a mainstream reception.

He made 54 films and it would be more or less impossible for a European director today to work anything as like as quickly - because the finance isn't there.

In that sense, he's the last of a breed. 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6922552.stm
Quote from: Pas Rap on April 23, 2010, 07:29:06 AM
Obviously what you are doing right now is called (in my upcoming book of psychology at least) validation. I think it's a normal thing to do. People will reply, say anything, and then you're gonna do what you were subconsciently thinking of doing all along.

Ravi

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070730/ap_en_ot/obit_snyder

Broadcaster Tom Snyder dies at 71

SAN FRANCISCO - Tom Snyder, whose smoke-filled interviews were a staple of late night television and an inspiration for Dan Aykroyd on "Saturday Night Live," has died after a struggle with leukemia. He was 71.

Snyder died Sunday in San Francisco from complications associated with leukemia, his longtime producer and friend Mike Horowicz told The Associated Press on Monday.

Known for his improvised, casual style and robust laughter, Snyder conducted a number of memorable interviews as host of NBC's "The Tomorrow Show." Among his guests were John Lennon, Charles Manson and Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols.

Snyder began his career as a radio reporter in Milwaukee in the 1960s, then moved into local television news. He anchored newscasts in Philadelphia and Los Angeles before moving to late night.

"He loved the broadcast business," said Marciarose Shestack, who co-anchored a noontime newscast with Snyder at KYW-TV in Philadelphia in the 1960s. "He was very surprising and very irreverent and not at all a typical newscaster."

In 1972, Snyder left news to host "The Tomorrow Show," which followed "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson.

His catch phrase for the show was: "Fire up a colortini, sit back, relax, and watch the pictures, now, as they fly through the air." Snyder smoked throughout his show, the cigarette cloud swirling around him during interviews.

He gained more fame when Ackroyd lampooned him in the early days of "Saturday Night Live."

In 1995, he returned to late night television as the host of "The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder" on CBS. The program followed David Letterman's "Late Show" until 1998, when Snyder was replaced by Craig Kilborn.

Snyder announced on his Web site in 2005 that he had chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

"When I was a kid leukemia was a death sentence," he wrote then. "Now, my doctors say it's treatable!"

Horowicz met Snyder in 1982 and worked with him at WABC in New York before producing the "Tom Snyder" television show.

"He was a great guy and very talented," Horowicz said.

Gold Trumpet

I know not too many people here are fans of sports, especially football in America. But this is as significant of a death as anyone for the game. If anyone here has any recollection of the game in the 60s and 70s, they know it was dominated by strict running offenses. Today it is more passing offenses. Bill Walsh was the man who bridged the gap between the old and the modern in football. He innovated the game on both the college and professional level. I hate the 49ers, but I have a lot of respect for what he did. 

Former 49ers coach Bill Walsh dead at 75

By JANIE MCCAULEY, AP Sports Writer
9 minutes ago



SAN FRANCISCO - Bill Walsh took great chances on the football field and with the people who worked for him. Take Jerry Rice, the superstar receiver he plucked from tiny Mississippi Valley State in the first round back in 1985.

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And Tyrone Willingham, the man he mentored during Willingham's Stanford coaching days and one of the first participants in Walsh's minority fellowship program.

Nicknamed "The Genius" for his creative schemes that became known as the West Coast offense, Walsh died at his Woodside home Monday morning following a long battle with leukemia. He was 75.

"He gave me the opportunity to come to a winner, San Francisco out of Mississippi Valley State University," Rice said. "I was the 16th player taken in the first round. It was all because of Bill Walsh and what he stood for. I think that was very unique for him, because he could see talent."

Walsh changed the NFL with his innovative offense and a legion of coaching disciples, breaking new ground and winning three Super Bowls with the San Francisco 49ers along the way.

"This is just a tremendous loss for all of us, especially to the Bay Area because of what he meant to the 49ers," said Joe Montana, San Francisco's Hall of Fame quarterback. "Outside of my dad he was probably the most influential person in my life. I am going to miss him."

Walsh didn't become an NFL head coach until 47, and he spent just 10 seasons on the San Francisco sideline. But he left an indelible mark on the nation's most popular sport, building the once-woebegone 49ers into the most successful team of the 1980s.

The soft-spoken Californian also produced an army of proteges. Many of his former assistants went on to lead their own teams, handing down Walsh's methods to dozens more coaches in a tree with innumerable branches.

"The essence of Bill Walsh was that he was an extraordinary teacher," NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said. "If you gave him a blackboard and a piece of chalk, he would become a whirlwind of wisdom."

Walsh went 102-63-1 with the 49ers, winning 10 of his 14 postseason games along with six division titles. He was the NFL's coach of the year in 1981 and 1984.

Few men did more to shape the look of football into the 21st century. His cerebral nature and often-brilliant stratagems earned him his nickname well before his election to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1993.

He visited with friends until the end, and attended basketball games at Stanford all winter. Willingham, now at Washington, and Stanford donor and alumnus John Arrillaga went to see Walsh on Sunday, presenting him with the Stagg Award for his outstanding service to football.

Walsh created the Minority Coaching Fellowship program in 1987, helping minority coaches get a foothold in a previously white-dominated profession. Willingham and Marvin Lewis were among those who went through the program, later adopted as a league-wide initiative.

"The world lost a great man in Bill Walsh. He had a tremendous impact on me, both personally and professionally," said Willingham, who replaced Walsh as Stanford's head coach in 1994. "Bill's development of the minority coaching program at the collegiate and professional levels literally changed the face of football."

Raiders owner Al Davis and Hall of Famer John Madden stopped by to see Walsh on Saturday, and Montana on Friday and also last Wednesday along with Ronnie Lott. Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young was headed to see Walsh on Monday when he received the sad news instead.

"He knew me well before I knew myself and knew what I could accomplish well before I knew that I could accomplish it," Young said. "That's a coach. That's the ultimate talent anyone could have. I said in my Hall of Fame speech that he was the most important person in football in the last 25 years, and I don't think there's any debate about that."

Walsh twice served as the 49ers' general manager, and coach George Seifert led San Francisco to two more Super Bowl titles after Walsh left the sideline. Walsh also coached Stanford during two terms over five seasons.

Even a short list of Walsh's adherents is stunning. Seifert, Mike Holmgren, Dennis Green, Sam Wyche, Ray Rhodes and Bruce Coslet all became NFL head coaches after serving on Walsh's San Francisco staffs, and Tony Dungy played for him. Most of his former assistants passed on Walsh's structures and strategies to a new generation of coaches, including Mike Shanahan, Jon Gruden, Brian Billick, Andy Reid, Pete Carroll, Gary Kubiak, Steve Mariucci and Jeff Fisher.

In 2004, Walsh was diagnosed with leukemia — the disease that also killed his son, former ABC News reporter Steve Walsh, in 2002 at age 46. He underwent months of treatment and blood transfusions, and publicly disclosed his illness in November 2006.

Born William Ernest Walsh on Nov. 30, 1931 in Los Angeles, Walsh's family moved to the Bay Area when he was a teenager.

He was a self-described "average" end at San Jose State in 1952-53. He married his college sweetheart, Geri Nardini, in 1954 and started his coaching career at Washington High School in Fremont, leading the football and swim teams.

Walsh was coaching in Fremont when Marv Levy, then the coach at the University of California, hired him as an assistant.

Walsh did a stint at Stanford before beginning his pro coaching career as an assistant with the AFL's Oakland Raiders in 1966, forging a friendship with Al Davis that endured through decades of rivalry. Walsh joined the Cincinnati Bengals in 1968 to work for legendary coach Paul Brown, who gradually gave complete control of the Bengals' offense to his assistant.

Walsh built a playbook that included short dropbacks and novel receiving routes, as well as constant repetition of every play in practice. Though it originated in Cincinnati, it became known many years later as the West Coast offense — a name Walsh never liked or repeated, but which eventually grew to encompass his offensive philosophy and the many tweaks added by Holmgren, Shanahan and others.

"He was a perfectionist," said Keena Turner, a linebacker with the Niners for 11 years before going on to coach. "When writing his script, he didn't believe that running the football was the way to get there. It had to be prettier than that — beautiful in some way."

By the 1990s, much of the NFL was running some version of the West Coast offense, with its fundamental belief that the passing game can set up an effective running attack, rather than the opposite conventional wisdom.

Walsh also is widely credited with inventing or popularizing many of the modern basics of coaching, from the laminated sheets of plays held by coaches on almost every sideline, to the practice of scripting the first 15 offensive plays of a game.

After a bitter falling-out with Brown in 1976, Walsh left for stints with the San Diego Chargers and Stanford before the 49ers chose him to rebuild the franchise in 1979.

The long-suffering team had gone 2-14 before Walsh's arrival. They repeated the record in his first season. Walsh doubted his abilities to turn around such a miserable situation — but earlier in 1979, the 49ers drafted Montana from Notre Dame.

Walsh turned over the starting job to Montana in 1980, when the 49ers improved to 6-10 — and improbably, San Francisco won its first championship in 1981, just two years after winning two games.

Championships followed in the postseasons of 1984 and 1988 as Walsh built a consistent winner. He also showed considerable acumen in personnel, adding Lott, Charles Haley, Roger Craig and Rice to his rosters after he was named the 49ers' general manager in 1982 and then president in 1985.

"I came to San Francisco, and I found another father, Bill Walsh," Rice said. "

Walsh left the 49ers with a profound case of burnout after his third Super Bowl victory in January 1989, though he later regretted not coaching longer.

He spent three years as a broadcaster with NBC before returning to Stanford for three seasons. He then took charge of the 49ers' front office in 1999, helping to rebuild the roster over three seasons. But Walsh gradually cut ties with the 49ers after his hand-picked successor as GM, Terry Donahue, took over in 2001.

He is survived by his wife, Geri, and two children, Craig and Elizabeth.


bonanzataz

Michelangelo Antonioni: 1912-2007

Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian film director whose modernist style created such haunting, enigmatic films as L'Avventura and Blow Up, died Monday at his home in Italy; he was 94. Antonioni had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1985 which gave him limited speech capabilities and curtailed his directing abilities, though he continued to work, most notably on 1995's Beyond the Clouds, after his stroke. Born in Ferrara, Italy, Antonioni graduated from the University of Bologna with a degree in economics but went to work for a local newspaper as a film writer and critic. Moving to Rome during World War II, he collaborated with Roberto Rossellini on A Pilot Returns and began making short documentaries. His first full-length film, Story of a Love Affair, was released in 1950, and he found his breakthrough with 1957's The Outcry, where he met actress Monica Vitti, who would go on to star in his famed film trilogy of emotional alienation: L'Avventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse, released from 1960-1962. With these austere black-and-white films, seductive and amazing to some and puzzling and mysterious to others (L'Avventura and L'Eclisse both won the Jury prizes at Cannes), Antonioni established himself as one of the premier international filmmakers of the time, alongside fellow countryman Federico Fellini and other emerging directors of the 60s such as Roman Polanski and Ingmar Bergman; he was considered such a fixture of the time that he was even mentioned in lyrics (alongside Fellini and Polanski) in the seminal musical of the 60s, Hair.

In 1966, Antonioni found box office as well as critical success with Blow Up, the story of a London photographer (David Hemmings) who believes he may have accidentally captured a murder on film. The quintessential portait of the swinging 60s, the film featured a luminous Vanessa Redgrave and, most notoriously, an imaginary, silent tennis game played between two sets of white-faced mimes. While some shrugged, others continued to celebrate his success, and Antonioni received two Academy Award nominations for writing and directing Blow Up. That film was followed by the notorious flop Zabriskie Point, an existentialist rumination in Death Valley featuring amateur actors, but Antonioni then rebounded with The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson as a journalist researching a documentary in the Sahara, now considered one of his best films. Antonioni made only a handful of films following The Passenger, and worked only in a limited fashion after his stroke, though he surprised critics and audiences with 1995's Beyond the Clouds, which producers would only back with the stipulation that director Wim Wenders follow the filming in case Antonioni faltered. Though he was only able to speak a few words, the director was able to communicate effectively with his crew and actors; the same year Beyond the Clouds was released, he received an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement. Antonioni is survived by his wife, Enrica, whom he married in 1986.
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