8/26/22
Newsletter84
The Crack of Dawn
It’s dark out.
Harry Belafonte was a phenomenon in 1950s. He introduced America to Calypso music, won three Grammys, an Emmy, and a Tony, and was the loudest and most adamant proponent of civil rights in Hollywood. Belafonte was an active member of the American civil rights movement before Martin Luther King joined. When King joined, he and Belafonte became great friends. By the end of ‘50s, Harry decided to see what help he could bring to Africa. He began visiting Kenya, and decided that if they just had a few well-educated people running the country they might succeed as a democracy. So, with his own money, Belafonte financed the college education of eight promising young Kenyan men. They could go to any college they wanted, but they had to return to Kenya afterward to put their knowledge to use helping their own country. One of these eight men chose the University of Hawaii. While he was there this young black man met a white woman, fell in love, got married, and had a son named Barack Obama who became the 44th President of the United States. Harry Belafonte is 95 years old, and has truly made a positive difference in the world.
At the age of 26, Larry McMurty had his first novel, Horseman, Pass By (1962), published. The book was immediately acquired by Hollywood and was made into the classic film, Hud (1963), that won three Oscars. McMurty’s book, The Last Picture Show (1966), was also made into a classic movie, and won two Oscars in 1971. McMurty said, and you won’t hear many authors say this, “The movie is better than the book.” McMurty’s book Terms of Endearment (1975) was made into a movie in 1983 that won five Oscars including Best Picture. While making The Last Picture Show, director Peter Bogdanovich said that he’d love to make a western with the aging actors, James Stewart and Henry Fonda. The idea stewed in McMurty’s head for a decade, then was finally realized as his book, Lonesome Dove (1983), that won the Pulitzer Prize. The book was made into a mini-series in 1989 that was an enormous success and won seven Emmy Awards. At the age of 70, McMurty won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay (with Diana Ossana) for Brokeback Mountain. McMurty died in 2021 at the age of 84, and may well be the most well-treated author in Hollywood history.
The beloved film, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), began its life as a Christmas card that included a little short story. Frank Capra, having been under contract to Columbia Pictures his entire professional career, decided to make It’s a Wonderful Life independently, and formed Liberty Films with William Wyler and George Stevens. Since Capra’s favorite cinematographer, Joseph Walker, had retired, he hired a young DP named Joseph Biroc. Capra and Biroc didn’t get along, so Capra fired him and got Walker to come out of retirement and finish the film (Joe Biroc, by the way, had a terrific career and won an Oscar in 1975 for Towering Inferno). As they were about to release It’s a Wonderful Life they realized that Liberty Films didn’t have a logo, so they hastily found a shot of the Liberty Bell and stuck it on, without a copyright notice. As per the copyright rules then, by releasing the film without a copyright notice immediately put the film into the public domain. It’s a Wonderful Life bombed at the box office, but did win one Oscar, a technical award for the creation of better fake snow.
It should be getting light out any second.