Movie hound Nick Clooney on the making of Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver:Scorsese recruited Bernard Herrmann to write the musical score, even though the extraordinary composer-conductor was then terminally ill. At sixty-four, Mr. Herrmann had made his mark in radio, the concert stage, opera, and most notably, motion pictures. After a long stint at CBS — where he met a young Orson Welles — he began his movie music career at the top.
Philip Roth has hit the three-quarter-century mark.The author of Portnoy’s Complaint was born in 1933 — same year as Willie Nelson and Yoko Ono.
Delightful reminiscence of actor Raymond Burr, sent in by reader Susan Brown-Barbour:”I met Raymond Burr in 1976 in Landers, California at Gublers’ Orchids. I worked there as a laborer/fill in lead person. He was very much into orchids at this time, and came to check out 2 large greenhouses for possible leasing from the owners.
Here’s the full text of Barack Obama’s speech on Tuesday in Philadelphia. Courtesy of The Chicago Tribune.
“The problem with reincarnation is that it’s hard to imagine what the storage medium for past lives would be. Not to mention the input-output device. I hesitate to rule it out completely, but I’d need pretty definite proof.”-Arthur C. Clarke, 1999
Anthony Minghella, the Oscar-winning director of The English Patient, has died at age 54.Early reports listed no cause of death. The BBC now says that he “suffered a fatal haemorrhage in London days after having surgery for cancer of the tonsils and neck.”
“As a kid, he was once caught having a crafty tab in the woods and frogmarched home by a family friend. His mother was furious with him. ‘And how working-class is this?’ he laughs, as he spins the Loachian tale. ‘When the woman had gone, my mother said to me, “If you’re going to smoke, you smoke in our house, not outside.”‘”-From a Sunday Times (UK) interview with actor Clive Owen
Editor Paul Hehn, manning the Fairy Tales and Air Power desk, has just profiled Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince.He passes along this odd little report from The Mail (UK) about a WWII Luftwaffe ace who loved Saint-Exupéry’s books — and just found out that he himself shot down the author in 1944.
David Paterson was sworn in as governor of New York today.Newsday has the story and the photos.
Sci-fi author William Gibson turns 60 today.He was 34 when he coined the term cyberspace and 36 when his groundbreaking novel Neuromancer was published in (ahem) 1984.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day.Nothing about Patrick’s life is particularly clear, but he seems to have been born a mere 1623 years ago, in 385. (Not on March 17th, though, as far as we know.) That would have made Patrick a contemporary of St. Augustine of Hippo and of Theodosius the Great, the last emperor of the unified Roman Empire.
Enchanted was the movie on Delta’s SFO-CVG flight today. Amy Adams is just terrific. I couldn’t stop smiling.And I was watching it without sound.
Fitness guru Jack LaLanne, still doing push-ups at age 93.(Side note: LaLanne was born the same year as the guru of anti-fitness, William S. Burroughs.)
The Washington Post remembers its coverage of the final days of poet Walt Whitman in 1891 (and 1892).Biography fans should visit the Post’s wonderful blog Post Mortem, source of the Whitman piece. Obituary writers Patricia Sullivan, Adam Bernstein and Matt Schudel use the blog to reflect on their craft and on the people they cover.
“The notion that it is of great advantage to me to be an African American named Barack Obama and pursue the presidency, I think, is not a view that has been commonly shared by the general public.”
New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has resigned.Sort of. He is still governor, but announced today that he would step down next Monday, March 17th. (St. Patrick’s Day, coincidentally.) He’ll be replaced by the current lieutenant governor, David Paterson.
Singer James Taylor is 60.The fan site James Taylor Online is still a great source for Taylor-mation, 14 years (!) after it was created in 1994. Plenty of fan sites lose steam after a few years, but this one has been a “steamroller” right along.
According to his BBC obituary:”His first child drowned, at the age of three, in W.C. Fields’s swimming pool.”
We almost missed it: actress Sharon Stone turned 50 yesterday.It’s been 16 years since her star-making turn as the krazy platinum vixen Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct.
For news and commentary about Eliot Spitzer — aka “Client 9” — we recommend the Political Bulletin from U.S. News & World Report. They have copious links to all the krazy details of this story.