It’s Oscar Sunday!
For many humans and cats, today is an unofficial holiday! Today is the day that we find out who and what the Academy has selected for the best of last year! We may agree. We may disagree. But a lot of us will be watching!
Happy Oscar Sunday, everyone! Please enjoy today’s Oscar-related posts. Who knows? We might even toss in some non-Oscar related posts as well! You never know!
Have you ever wondered what it takes to win an Oscar? The 1966 film, The Oscar, revealed to audiences just how sleazy a world Hollywood can be. Frankie Fane (Stephen Boyd) does everything he can to win an Oscar and he doesn’t care who he hurts!
But fear not — Hollywood may not be perfect but it has no room for someone like Frankie Fane! At the end of the movie, a man named Frank does win the Oscar but his last name is Sinatra and Frankie Fane is left humiliated. That’ll teach him to try to take advantage of Hollywood!
Yes, The Oscar is an incredibly silly film but it’s also a lot of fun. In this scene that I love, Frankie’s best friend — played by Tony Bennett of all people — confronts Frankie about the type of star that he’s become.
An hour ago, I told you about the only Oscar nomination that was ever received by Crown International Pictures, one of the most prolific B-movie distributors of the 70s and 80s. That nomination was for Best Original Song for Crown’s 1972 film, The Stepmother.
Here are 6 more films from Crown International Pictures that I think deserved some Oscar consideration:
“She corrupted the youthful morality of the entire school!” the poster screamed but actually, The Teacher was a surprisingly sensitive coming-of-age story about a relationship between a younger man and an older woman. Jay North and Angel Tompkins both give excellent performances and Anthony James shows why he was one of the busiest character actors of the 70s.
John Savage has been acting for several decades. He’s appeared in a number of acclaimed films but he’s never received an Oscar nomination. One of his best performances was in this melancholy look at love, betrayal, and ennui in the early 70s.
One of the strangest films ever released by Crown International, Best Friends is also one of the best. A road trip between two old friends goes terribly wrong when one of the friends turns out to be a total psycho. This well-acted and rather sad film definitely deserves to be better-known than it is.
4. Trip With The Teacher (1975)
Zalman King for Best Supporting Actor? Hell yeah!
Surely Kim Bentley’s performance as a high school student-turned-professional assassin deserved some sort of consideration!
6. Don’t Answer The Phone (1980)
Don’t Answer The Phone is not a particularly good movie but it certainly is effective. It made me want to go out and get a derringer or some other cute little gun that I could carry in my purse. That’s largely because of the performance of Nicholas Worth. Worth plays one of the most perverse and frightening murderers of all time and Worth throws himself into the role. It’s one of the best psycho performances of all time and certainly worthy of a Best Supporting Actor nomination.
If you’re fan of old movies that used to play in the grindhouses or at the drive-ins, you’re familiar with the Crown International Picture logo.
This logo appeared at the start of some of the most entertaining and cheaply made exploitation films of all time. These were movies with titles like Malibu Beach, The Teacher, Cavegirl, They Saved Hitler’s Brain, The Sidehackers, My Tutor, Trip With The Teacher, Best Friends, and The Sister-in-Law. These films may have never been critically acclaimed but they’re still being discovered and loved by viewers today.
Crown International Pictures was founded in 1959 and ceased operations in 1992. Over the course of 43 years, the studio only received one Oscar nomination. That was in 1972, for Best Original Song. Written by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster, Strange Are The Ways Of Love played over the credits for The Stepmother.
In honor of both the Oscars and Crown International Picture, here is Strange Are The Ways Of Love…
Artist Unknown
Happy Oscar Sunday!
Looming nuclear war with North Korea! Looming cold war with Russia! Looming trade war with every other country on the planet! What have we got to take our minds off all this potential conflict? Why, comics, of course! And this week offered plenty of distraction — some good, some decidedly less so.
The Beef #1 is the opening salvo in a four-parter from Image that has apparently been in the works for quite some time. Co-writers Richard Starkings and Tyler Shainline, of Elephantmen and Liberty Justice, respectively, join forces with living legend (as far as I’m concerned) Shaky Kane to serve up this story that appears to be part character-study of a lonely middle-aged “nobody,” part examination of small-town generational entrapment, part super-hero parody, and part polemic on the merits of vegetarianism. Kane’s art and colors are, needless to say, absolutely magnificent — larger than life and twice as…
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Way back in January, I took the time to read the 1966 novel, Valley of the Dolls. While I had already seen the film that this work inspired, this was my first time to read the actual book.
Before I even opened to the front page, I knew that Valley of the Dolls had been a best-seller, that it inspired a countless number of imitations, and that it had a reputation for being really, really bad. As soon as I started to read the first chapter, I discovered that the book’s reputation was well-earned. To call author Jacqueline Susann’s prose clunky was a bit of an insult to clunky prose everywhere.
Opening in 1945 and covering 24 years in cultural, sexual, and drug history, Valley of the Dolls starts with Anne Welles leaving her boring home in New England and relocating to New York, where she promptly gets a job at a theatrical agency. Everyone tells Anne that she’s beautiful and should be trying to become a star but Anne says that she’s not interested in that. (You’ll be thoroughly sick of Anne’s modesty before reaching the tenth page.) Everyone says that Anne is incredibly intelligent, even though she never really does anything intelligent. Everyone says that she’s witty, even though she never says anything that’s particularly funny. In short, Anne Welles is perhaps the most annoying literary character of all time. Anne spends about 20 years waiting for her chance to marry aspiring author Lyon Burke. When she does, Lyon turns out to be a heel and drives Anne to start taking drugs. I assume it’s meant to be somewhat tragic but who knows? Maybe all of the pills (or “the dolls” as the characters in the book call them) will give Anne a personality.
They certainly worl wonders for everyone else in the book. Neely O’Hara is constantly taking pills and she’s the best character in the book. Unlike Anne, she’s never modest. She’s never quiet. She’s actually funny. Even more importantly, she doesn’t spend the whole book obsessing over one man. Instead, she’s always either throwing a tantrum or having an affair or abandoning her children or getting sent to a mental institution. Neely’s a lot of fun. Unfortunately, we don’t really get to see much of Neely until after having to slog through a hundred or so pages of Anne being boring.
The other major character is Jennifer North, a starlet who was apparently based on Marilyn Monroe. The parts of the book dealing with Jennifer are actually about as close as Valley of the Dolls actually gets to being, for lack of a better term, good. In fact, if the book just dealt with Jennifer’s tragice story, it would probably be remembered as a minor classic. Instead, Jennifer is often overshadowed by Neely (which is understandable since Neely’s insane and therefore capable of saying anything) and Anne (who, as I mentioned before, is the most annoying literary characters of all time).
Why is Valley of the Dolls a guilty pleasure? A lot of it is because of all of the sexual melodrama and pill-popping, the descriptions of which are often so overwritten that they’re unintentionally hilarious. Most of it is because Neely O’Hara goes crazy with so much overwrought style. Whenever the book focuses on Neely, Susann’s inartful prose is replaced with a stream-of-consciousness tour of Neely’s paranoid and petty mind. Interestingly enough, some of the most infamous scenes from the movie are also present in the novel. Remember that scene where Neely rips off Helen Lawson’s wig and then flushes it down a toilet? That’s actually in the book!
Anyway, it’s an incredibly silly but compulsively readable book … or, at least, it is if you can make it through all the boring stuff with Anne at the beginning. Then again, as annoying as Anne is, she doesn’t exactly get a happy ending. Perhaps that’s why Valley of the Dolls is such a guilty pleasure.
Previous Guilty Pleasures
With this being Oscar Sunday, it’s good to be reminded that everyone had to start somewhere! Brie Larson rightly won an Oscar for Room but, before that movie, she was just another singer pretending to be a waitress and singing songs of empowerment.
Need proof?
Watch today’s music video of the day and…
ENJOY!
Through the Shattered Lens 