Who's Next To Croak?

[Gold Trumpet]

personally the great work horse american director is john ford, but to each his own.

Well, Ford fell under the studio system and stuck to one genre. While he gave that genre its visual history to always be a reference to, I find him incomparable to Lumet. When I was lauding Lumet as a workman director, I was talking about the history after the studio system. In that sense, Lumet has had gone to considerable length to be a workman director in a unstable system. The accomplishment is standout for me compared to his peers. Mike Nichols is someone I think along the same lines in some ways, but he doesn't have the same number of great films and on some films, I think he was hired gun in very technical sense of the word. There is a Lumet grade of quality work with everything he does.

Reelist, if you haven't seen The Verdict, I'd watch it. Don't know what you have or haven't seen.

[Reel]

This guy

[polkablues]

Not Serpico!

[squints]

wow, i really did find out about this first on xixax. Nice.

[Pas]

Wish they could've arrested him. An execution is much more romantic than a mere assassination.

So the dude who shot him is now a millionaire! Congrats!

[Pas]

Wow nobody gives a shit about this it seems.

I guess everyone is fine with the US going around houses and killing people and whatnot. Nobody is wondering why gasing the shit out of the room he was in and capturing him alive for trial wasn't tried? I sure am.

This is all so cheap. The rejoicers are faking it. If someone slaughtered my whole family and then 10 years later he was shot in the face and dumped in the ocean, I would be seriously pissed off.

The whole point of the thing was to capture him, put him in a courtroom, judge him guilty of the murder of X thousand people and sentence him to death. Or better yet lock him in a cement box for 100 000 years. Now he's just another martyr for the jihadist, just another statistic.

I guess the whole point is that under no circumstance the US wanted to let Ossama Bin Laden talk in a courtroom. That says a lot about what he would have to say...

[Reel]

ehh it's better that he's just dead. I would've liked to see him in handcuffs or something, at least that would prove it was true, but you think his boys are gonna let that happen? Naaahhh, you shoot for the kill.

[classical gas]

I see what you're saying Pas, but can you imagine the tension, from all sides, surrounding that trial?  I doubt it would have been pretty.  So, I'm not saying that I disagree, but it could be for the best.

[Gold Trumpet]

Reports suggest special forces tried to take Bin Laden alive, but they were receiving fire so they returned the fire back. A woman was killed. She may or may have been used as a human shield by Bin Laden. Some reports indicate she was. Either way, I don't think Bin Laden was going quietly into the night. Also, congratulate the intelligence community for developing a thorough case before proceeding. You can argue civil liberties in this matter, but it's a minor operation by modern standards. The better civil liberty cause to take up is the use of drone airplanes in Pakistan and Mexico. I find little to argue with here.

[Mr. Merrill Lehrl]

Former Playboy pinup and B-movie actress Yvette Vickers died at the age of 82. But it wasn't until a year later—last Wednesday—that her mummified body was found in her Beverly Hills home.

Neighbor Susan Savage found the Attack of the 50 Foot Woman star lying on the floor of an upstairs room, after pushing open a barricaded front gate, "scaling a hillside", climbing through a broken window and pushing through stacks of "clothes, junk mail and letters" to reach her, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Although Vickers generally kept to herself in the neighborhood, Savage decided to check on her after seeing cobwebs and old letters in her mailbox.

"The letters seemed untouched and were starting to yellow," Savage said. "I just had a bad feeling."

Vickers' body, which was lying on the floor that entire time, was so decomposed that it was unrecognizable.

[Mr. Merrill Lehrl]

+ A Guardian article on this:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/may/11/film-industry-usa

The concerned neighbour suspected something amiss. She came to check on the old lady and saw the mailbox covered with cobwebs. The only letters in it were yellowing, untouched bills. Forcing open the barricaded front gate and peering through a broken window, she saw lights illuminating a formerly beautiful interior now in total disrepair, filthy clothes, junk mail and boxes strewn everywhere.

Once inside, the only sound she heard was the low hum of a space heater still running. Evidently, the utility company never turned off the power. In the bedroom, she noticed a dead cordless phone on the floor ... before she made the grisly discovery of a mummified, unrecognizable corpse. She knew instinctively it was the old lady.

The police said the woman, in her eighties, may have been dead for months. Lonely old women who die alone are a tragically common occurrence, not frontpage news. But this woman, Yvette Vickers, living a stone's throw from Hollywood, had a backstory unlike most others.

An acting major at UCLA, she sought Hollywood success like so many other beautiful young girls. In her early twenties, she was lucky when she caught the eye of the great director Billy Wilder. He gave her a brief cameo with William Holden in the 1950 classic, Sunset Boulevard. Ironically, Sunset Boulevard stars Gloria Swanson as an actress who becomes a star but is discarded by Hollywood when she loses her youth and beauty. She winds up living in an old house as a recluse.

With looks that Madison Avenue coveted, Yvette soon found success as a national model for White Rain shampoo. She could have morphed into the 1950s all-American darling of men in grey flannel suits. Instead, Yvette entered a parallel universe as her career provided the public a glimpse of the alternative 1950s, the dark side of the Eisenhower years of conformity, family entertainment and wholesome women.

Her first serious role was during the McCarthy era in the early television series, I Led Three Lives, the story of an FBI undercover agent who ferrets out Communists. Yvette played a lovely Communist co-ed, luring unsuspecting college boys on campus with her feminine wiles into the subversive trap of godless Communism.

Though beautiful, and with a fetching figure, Yvette was a middling actress. Still, she gained B-movie queen cult status in the low-budget horror flick, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958). She played "the other woman" to the title character (her co-star is the woman in the iconic poster). Yvette ultimately became the object of the 50 Foot Women's revenge. In the followup film, Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959), she had an illicit affair and was then killed by leeches. Countless teenagers at American drive-ins watched her seduction of a married man followed by the retribution of errant women fifties' movies demanded.

In his book, On Writing, no less than Stephen King cites the influence Yvette Vickers had at that point in shaping his literary persona:

   "When I lay in bed at night under my eave, listening to the wind in the trees or the rats in the attic, it was not Debbie Reynolds as Tammy or Sandra Dee as gidget that I dreamed of, but Yvette Vickers from Attack of the Giant Leaches ... never mind sweet, never mind uplifting ... at 13 I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash."

Her B-movie queen status was further enhanced when Hugh Hefner selected her as Playboy's July 1959 "playmate". Back then, the fledgling magazine represented a challenge to middle-class mores. She featured in Playboy's "beatnik issue", and the shoot was done by future alternative filmmaker Russ Meyer. Her languorous pose on a couch, surrounded by jazz records, was risqué back then, though tame by today's standards. Yvette's "Playboy profile" featured her love of coffeehouses and the bohemian lifestyle – the beautiful rebel, shunning conformity.

Her final major film role was a brief scene in the 1963 western, Hud, with Paul Newman and Melvyn Douglas. She played – what else? – a married woman having an affair with Newman. When his father, the elderly Douglas, dies at the end of the movie, Newman says: "This world's so fulla crap, a man's gonna get into it sooner or later whether he's careful or not." Prophetically true for Yvette, as roles became scarce and she was replaced by younger vixens. She became reclusive and gradually receded from public memory, until her eerie death. If Stephen King is aware of Yvette Vickers's passing, he has said nothing publicly.

The Playboy readers and B-movie devotees who once admired her are now old or gone themselves. Even Hollywood greats like Gloria Swanson, Billy Wilder, Melvyn Douglas and William Holden are names almost forgotten today.

Hollywood can be cruelest to those it once favoured, who dare outlive their welcome (take heed, Lindsay Lohan). Even by Tinsel Town standards, Yvette Vickers's punishment seems especially vindictive – a mailbox full of cobwebs, a phone that never rang and, ultimately, a macabre denouement, alone among the detritus of a life once so full of promise.

[MacGuffin]

Dolores Fuller dies at 88; actress dated director Ed Wood
Source: Los Angeles Times

Dolores Fuller, the onetime actress-girlfriend of cross-dressing schlock movie director Ed Wood who co-starred with Wood in his low-budget 1950s cult classic "Glen or Glenda," has died. She was 88. Fuller, whose show business career included writing the lyrics to a dozen Elvis Presley movie songs, died Monday at her home in Las Vegas after a long illness, said her stepdaughter, Susan Chamberlin. As the former girlfriend and two-time leading lady for the legendary filmmaker who came to be known as the world's worst movie director, Fuller became something of a cult figure herself in her later years. "Ed always said he'd make me a star," Fuller told the Kansas City Star in 1994. "I just didn't realize it would take 42 years." At the time, Fuller was caught up in the flurry of publicity surrounding the release of director Tim Burton's biopic "Ed Wood," starring Johnny Depp as the eccentric D-movie director and Sarah Jessica Parker as Fuller. "Not in my wildest nightmares did I ever think I'd see the day when Eddie's movies would be popular," said Fuller, who was in Kansas City to appear at an Ed Wood Film Festival. She was a bit movie player, a model on TV's "Queen for a Day" and Dinah Shore's stand-in on the star's musical TV show when she responded to a casting call and met Wood in late 1952. "When I got to the casting call and first laid eyes on the young Edward, I just thought he was extremely handsome, and his personality was bubbly and fun," Fuller recalled in a 1994 interview with Tom Weaver for Fangoria magazine. "Then when I found out he was also a director and writer as well as a producer and actor, I was very impressed. ... I knew immediately that he liked me, too." The divorced Fuller soon moved in with Wood, who cast her in "Glen or Glenda," the 1953 film in which she played the fiancee of Wood's secret cross-dresser who has a passion for angora sweaters.

Fuller said in the Fangoria interview that she "didn't know Eddie was a transvestite when we first got together —even the first year, I didn't know." Her first clue, she said, "was when he was writing one evening and we were having a glass of wine together, and he said he'd like to borrow my white angora sweater. "I said, 'Why do you want to borrow it?' and he said, 'Well, it helps me write, I feel so much more comfortable. I hate men's hard clothes, I like soft, cuddly things. It makes my creative juices flow!' Well, we were all alone and I saw no harm in it. ... That was my first inkling that maybe he had a fetish. But I didn't realize it went any further." When she saw the final version of "Glen or Glenda," with Wood in a wig and women's clothing, she said, "I wanted to crawl under the seat!" Fuller, who described herself as the "breadwinner" while she and Wood lived together, went on to star in his 1954 crime thriller "Jail Bait." She also had a small part in his 1955 horror film "Bride of the Monster." Wood had written that movie for her to play the female lead, but then gave it to another actress. That, combined with his drinking, led Fuller to split up with him in 1955, according to the Fangoria article. She moved to New York, where she studied with Stella Adler at the Actors Studio. "I decided I needed lessons after seeing Ed's films," she told the Kansas City Star. A friendship with producer Hal Wallis led to her co-write (with composer Ben Weisman) "Rock-a-Hula Baby" for Presley's 1961 movie "Blue Hawaii." She went on to co-write other songs for Presley movies such as "Kid Galahad," "It Happened at the World's Fair," "Fun in Acapulco" and "Spinout" —as well as co-writing "Someone to Tell it To," which was recorded by Nat King Cole, and "Losers Weepers," which was recorded by Peggy Lee. Fuller also founded a record company, launched Johnny Rivers' recording career and served as a talent manager. She was born March 10, 1923, in South Bend, Ind., and moved to California when she was 10. Her family was staying in a motel in El Monte when she had her first brush with Hollywood, as a background extra in Frank Capra's "It Happened One Night," which was shooting at the motel. Fuller, who began modeling at 16, chronicled her life in her 2009 autobiography, "A Fuller Life: Hollywood, Ed Wood and Me." She is survived by her husband, film historian Philip Chamberlin; her son, Don; three grandchildren and numerous stepchildren and stepgrandchildren.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

http://www.tmz.com/2011/05/20/randy-savage-car-accident-macho-man-dead-dies-died-killed-wwe-wrestler-florida/



MZ spoke with Randy's brother, Lanny Poffo, who tells us the wrestling legend suffered a heart attack while he was behind the wheel around 9:25 AM ... and lost control of his vehicle.

Earlier this month, Savage celebrated his 1-year anniversary with his new wife Lynn.

Savage was 58.

Macho Man began wrestling in the WWF in 1985 and became a superstar with his trademark catchphrase "Ooooooh Yeaahhhhh." Savage was so popular, he became the spokesperson for Slim Jim in the mid '90s ... and became virtually synonymous with the brand.

UPDATE: Florida Highway Patrol tells TMZ ... Savage was driving his 2009 Jeep Wrangler when he veered across a concrete median ... through oncoming traffic ... and "collided head-on with a tree."

Savage was transported to Largo Medical center, where he died from his injuries.

Savage's wife was a passenger in the vehicle during the collision -- but survived with "minor injuries." She was transported to a different local hospital where she was treated.

According to officials, Randy and Lynn were both wearing their seatbelts at the time of the accident.

Cops say alcohol was NOT a factor.

An investigation into the accident is underway.

[72teeth]

snapping one off for you, m'friend... oh yeyuh... oh... yeyuh-h-h-h 

[Gold Trumpet]

Macho Man was highly underrated as a wrestler. He had some of the best matches in 1980s WWF history. Today the Hulk Hogan myth sucks and his old matches are awful to watch, but Macho Man gets better with age. I'm glad he didn't die in an apartment unconscious like other wrestlers do. It looked like he was going to have a longer lifer than others. Just too bad a "medical condition" contributed to his accident because I'm now waiting for autopsies to confirm it was steroid related.