Gary Cooper born

Year
1901
Month Day
May 07

On May 7, 1901, Gary Cooper, who will become famous for his performances in such movies as High Noon and The Pride of the Yankees, is born in Helena, Montana.

Cooper grew up on the ranch owned by his wealthy father, a Montana Supreme Court Justice. He was educated largely in England through high school, and the diverse experiences of his upbringing later informed his screen persona, at once rugged frontier hero and blue-blooded gentleman. In 1924, after dropping out of college, Cooper headed to Hollywood, where he got his start in movies as a cowboy extra in a Western film. He landed his first starring role two years later, in the silent film The Winning of Barbara Worth. His first successful “talkie,” The Virginian (1929), elevated Cooper to A-list status, and he went on to appear in a number of films in the 1930s, including Morocco (1930), A Farewell to Arms (1932), Design for Living (1933), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Desire (1936), The Plainsman (1937), Beau Geste (1939) and The Westerner (1940).

Cooper and his notably understated, laconic acting style won special notice as the unlikely everyman hero in two films directed by Frank Capra: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), for which he received an Academy Award nomination, and Meet John Doe (1941). Also in 1941, Cooper won the Oscar for Best Actor for his portrayal of the real-life World War I hero Alvin York in Sergeant York. He turned in another acclaimed performance as the baseball legend Lou Gehrig in Pride of the Yankees (1942). Cooper’s other notable 1940s films included Ball of Fire (1941), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) and The Fountainhead (1949).

In 1947, Cooper appeared as a “friendly” witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee, testifying as to the existence of a Communist influence in Hollywood. According to Cooper, he had “turned down quite a few scripts because I thought they were tinged with communistic ideas.” Despite his indirect participation in the hated blacklisting practice that followed, Cooper retained his status as one of Hollywood’s most revered leading men. He won his second Best Actor Oscar as an aging lawman in the classic High Noon (1952). Among his last films were Friendly Persuasion (1956) and Love in the Afternoon (1957).

In all, Cooper made more than 100 films over the course of his career. Married to the socialite Veronica Balfe (who had a short-lived acting career as Sandra Shaw) since 1933, Cooper was also known for his many romances with co-stars, including Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly and Patricia Neal. Late in his life, Cooper suffered from recurring illnesses, including lung cancer. Though he kept the information secret, the public got a hint in April 1961, when Jimmy Stewart made an emotional speech while accepting a lifetime achievement Academy Award for his ailing friend. Cooper died a month later, days after his 60th birthday.

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Famous scene from “Gone with the Wind” filmed

Year
1939
Month Day
June 27

On June 27, 1939, one of the most famous scenes in movie history is filmed: Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara parting in Gone with the Wind. Director Victor Fleming also shot the scene using the alternate line, “Frankly, my dear, I just don’t care,” in case the film censors objected to the word “damn.” The censors approved the movie but fined producer David O. Selznick $5,000 for including the curse.

The filming of the famous epic was itself an epic, with two and half years elapsing between Selznick’s purchase of the rights to Margaret Mitchell’s novel and the movie’s debut in Atlanta in December 1939. While the film eventually garnered many awards, it has also drawn criticism for its romanticism of the Antebellum South and whitewashing of the horrors of slavery

Filming began on December 10, 1938, with the burning of Atlanta scene, although O’Hara still hadn’t been cast. British actress Vivien Leigh, newly arrived from London, dropped by the set to visit her agent, Myron Selznick, brother of the producer. David O. Selznick asked her to test for O’Hara. In January, Leigh signed on. Clark Gable, Olivia de Havilland, Leslie Howard and Hattie McDaniel also starred. McDaniel, who played Mammy, the Tara Plantation house servant and formerly enslaved woman, became the first African American actor to win an Oscar for her performance. 

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Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” opens


Year
1972
Month Day
March 15

On March 15, 1972, The Godfather—a three-hour epic chronicling the lives of the Corleones, an Italian-American crime family led by the powerful Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando)—is released in theaters.

The Godfather was adapted from the best-selling book of the same name by Mario Puzo, a novelist who grew up in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen and got his start writing pulp stories for men’s magazines. Controversy surrounded the film from the beginning: Soon after Paramount Pictures announced its production, the Italian-American Civil Rights League held a rally in Madison Square Garden, claiming the film would amount to a slur against Italian Americans. The uproar only increased publicity for the movie, which Paramount was counting to become a big-money hit after the success of Puzo’s novel.

The studio’s production chief, Robert Evans, approached several directors—including Sergio Leone and Costa Gavras—about The Godfather before hiring the relatively unknown Francis Ford Coppola, who was only 31 years old at the time. As an Italian American himself, Coppola strove to make the film an authentic representation of the time period and the culture, and to do justice to the complex relationships within the Corleone family, instead of focusing primarily on the violent crime aspect of the story. He worked with Puzo on the screenplay and persuaded Paramount to increase the budget of the film, which the studio had envisioned as a relatively meager $2.5 million.

Perhaps most importantly, Coppola and Puzo fought to cast Marlon Brando in the coveted role of Vito Corleone. At the time, Brando’s career had been in decline for a decade, and he had become notorious for his moody on-set behavior, most notably during the filming of 1962’s Mutiny on the Bounty. When Paramount insisted that Brando do a screen test, the legendary actor complied because he wanted the role so badly. Reading his lines from hidden cue cards, Brando turned in a phenomenal, intuitive performance as the Godfather, winning an Academy Award for Best Actor (which he declined to accept). Combined with Coppola’s meticulous direction and memorable performances by the rest of the film’s cast, including Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall and Diane Keaton, Brando’s star turn propelled the film to record-breaking box-office success, as well as three Academy Awards, for Best Actor, Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.

The Godfather has remained a perennial choice on critics’ lists of the all-time best films in history. In 2007, it ranked second on the American Film Institute (AFI)’s list of the greatest movies of all time, behind Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941). Its sequel, The Godfather: Part II, was released in 1974 and won six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. A third installment, The Godfather: Part III (1990), received some positive reviews but was generally considered to be the weakest of the three films.

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Frank Sinatra dies

Year
1998
Month Day
May 14

On May 14, 1998, the legendary singer, actor and show-business icon Frank Sinatra dies of a heart attack in Los Angeles, at the age of 82.

Sinatra emerged from an Italian-American family in Hoboken, New Jersey, to become the first modern superstar of popular music, with an entertainment career that spanned more than five decades. In the first incarnation of his singing career, he was a master of the romantic ballads popular during World War II. After his appeal began to wane in the late 1940s, Sinatra reinvented himself as a suave swinger with a rougher, world-weary singing style, and began a spectacular comeback in the 1950s.

In addition to his great musical success, Sinatra appeared in 58 films; one of his earliest was Anchors Aweigh (1945). Playing a cocky Italian-American soldier who meets a violent death in From Here to Eternity (1953), co-starring Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift, Sinatra won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. His film career flourished after that, as he starred as Nathan Detroit in the movie musical Guys and Dolls (1955) and played a heroin addict in The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), for which he was nominated for the Oscar for Best Actor. He also starred in the musicals High Society (1956) and Pal Joey (1957) and turned in a memorable performance as an Army investigator in the acclaimed film The Manchurian Candidate (1962).

By the late 1950s, Sinatra had become the epitome of show-business success and glamorous, rough-edged masculinity. He even headed up his own entourage, known as the Rat Pack, which included Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop. The group had originally formed around Humphrey Bogart, who died in 1957. The Rat Pack first appeared together on the big screen in 1960’s casino caper Ocean’s Eleven. They would go on to make Sergeant’s Three (1962), Four for Texas (1963) and Robin and the Seven Hoods (1964). Onscreen and in real life, the Pack’s famous stomping grounds included Las Vegas, Los Angeles and New York (notably the Copacabana Club).

Sinatra worked steadily in film throughout the 1960s, though many of his performances seemed almost perfunctory. His last major Hollywood role came in 1980’s The First Deadly Sin. A famous heartthrob, Sinatra married four times, divorcing his longtime sweetheart Nancy Barbato after a decade and three children (Nancy, Frank Jr. and Christina) to marry the actress Ava Gardner in 1951. Their marriage lasted less than two years, and in 1966 Sinatra married the 21-year-old actress Mia Farrow, 30 years his junior; they were divorced in 1968. In 1976, he married Barbara Blakely Marx (the former wife of Zeppo Marx), and they remained together until his death.

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“Forrest Gump” opens, wins Tom Hanks a second Oscar

Year
1994
Month Day
July 06

On July 6, 1994, the movie Forrest Gump opens in U.S. theaters. A huge box-office success, the film starred Tom Hanks in the title role of Forrest, a good-hearted man with a low I.Q. who winds up at the center of key cultural and historical events of the second half of the 20th century.

Forrest Gump was based on a 1986 novel of the same name by Winston Groom, who (like his main character) grew up in Alabama and served in the Army during Vietnam. In the film—which included now-famous lines like “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get”—Forrest is a star runner and ping-pong prodigy who inadvertently rubs elbows with the key figures in a number of landmark events, from Elvis to the Civil Rights Movement to Watergate to the rise of Apple computers. He pursues and eventually marries his childhood friend Jenny, played by Robin Wright Penn, who veered from Forrest’s conservative path and became a hippie in the 1960s. Some commentators argued that Jenny’s eventual demise was a statement about the counter-culture movement in America.

Forrest Gump received 13 Academy Award nominations and took home six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role (Hanks) and Best Director (Robert Zemeckis). The film also won an Oscar for its then-cutting-edge computer-generated imagery (CGI) special effects, which incorporated Forrest Gump into existing news footage with famous world figures including John F. Kennedy, John Lennon and Richard Nixon.

The win was Hanks’ second in the Best Actor category. A year earlier, the actor had nabbed an Oscar for his starring role as a lawyer with AIDS in Philadelphia (1993). With Forrest Gump, Hanks became only the second actor, after Spencer Tracy, to win back-to-back Oscars. 

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First movie projector demonstrated in United States

Year
1895
Month Day
April 21

On April 21, 1895, Woodville Latham and his sons, Otway and Gray, demonstrate their “Panopticon,” the first movie projector developed in the United States.

Although motion pictures had been shown in the United States for several years using Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, the films could only be viewed one at a time in a peep-show box, not projected to a large audience. Brothers Grey and Otway Latham, the founders of a company that produced and exhibited films of prize fights using the Kinetoscope, called on their father, Woodville, and W.K.L. Dickson, an assistant in the Edison Laboratory, to help them develop a device that would project life-sized images onto a screen in order to attract larger audiences.

A former Confederate officer during the American Civil War, Woodville Latham was also a chemistry professor at the University of West Virginia for a time. Together with Dickson and another former Edison employee, Eugene Lauste, Woodville came up with the so-called “Latham Loop”–a loop that was placed in the strip of film just before it entered the gate of the camera so that the projector could quickly pause to display the image and then advance the film, without pulling directly on the film strip and risking a tear. That simple innovation allowed the Lathams to film long sequences, such as an entire prize fight, on one strip of film. This was a major improvement over the Kinetoscope, whose jerky motion had tended to tear any strip of film measuring over 100 feet.

“Pantopticon Rivals the Kinetoscope” read the headline over a small report in the New York Times on April 22, 1895. “Prof. Woodville Latham yesterday gave a private exhibition of the workings of what he calls a Panopticon, which is a combination of the kinetoscope and stereopticon, at 35 Frankfort Street. The effect is precisely like that of a kinetoscope, only that the pictures are much larger, and can be seen by a large number of people assembled in the darkened room.” That June, the elder Latham officially filed a request for a patent for his “Projecting-Kinetoscope”.

Inspired by a Kinetoscope exhibition in Paris, another pair of brothers, the Frenchmen Auguste and Louis Lumière, would invent their own motion-picture projector, the cinematographe, by the end of 1895. Projected movies were first shown to paying audiences starting the following year, usually as part of a vaudeville show. The first theater devoted solely to projected movies, the Electric Theater in Los Angeles, opened in 1902. Less than a year after the Lathams’ demonstration, Thomas Armat used a method similar to the Latham Loop to develop a state-of-the art projector he would sell to Edison, who marketed the machine as the Vitascope. Even in present day Hollywood, versions of the famous loop can be found in every motion-picture film camera and projector.

READ MORE: First Commercial Movie Screened 

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First nickelodeon opens

Year
1905
Month Day
June 19

On June 19, 1905, some 450 people attend the opening day of the world’s first nickelodeon, located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and developed by the showman Harry Davis. The storefront theater boasted 96 seats and charged each patron five cents. Nickelodeons (named for a combination of the admission cost and the Greek word for “theater”) soon spread across the country. Their usual offerings included live vaudeville acts as well as short films. By 1907, some 2 million Americans had visited a nickelodeon, and the storefront theaters remained the main outlet for films until they were replaced around 1910 by large modern theaters.

Inventors in Europe and the United States, including Thomas Edison, had been developing movie cameras since the late 1880s. Early films could only be viewed as peep shows, but by the late 1890s movies could be projected onto a screen. Audiences were beginning to attend public demonstrations, and several movie “factories” (as the earliest production studios were called) were formed. In 1896, the Edison Company inaugurated the era of commercial movies, showing a collection of moving images as a minor act in a vaudeville show that also included live performers, among whom were a Russian clown, an “eccentric dancer” and a “gymnastic comedian.” The film, shown at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in New York City, featured images of dancers, ocean waves and gondolas.

Short films, usually less than a minute long, became a regular part of vaudeville shows at the turn of the century as “chasers” to clear out the audience after a show. A vaudeville performers’ strike in 1901, however, left theaters scrambling for acts, and movies became the main event. In the earliest years, vaudeville theater owners had to purchase films from factories via mail order, rather than renting them, which made it expensive to change shows frequently. Starting in 1902, Henry Miles of San Francisco began renting films to theaters, forming the basis of today’s distribution system. The first theater devoted solely to films, The Electric Theater in Los Angeles, opened in 1902. Housed in a tent, the theater’s first screening included a short called New York in a Blizzard. Admission cost about 10 cents for a one-hour show. Nickelodeons developed soon after, offering both movies and live acts.

READ MORE: How TV Killed Hollywood’s Golden Age

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First color 3-D film opens

Year
1953
Month Day
April 10

On April 10, 1953, the horror film The House of Wax, starring Vincent Price, opens at New York’s Paramount Theater. Released by Warner Brothers, it was the first movie from a major motion-picture studio to be shot using the three-dimensional, or stereoscopic, film process and one of the first horror films to be shot in color.

Directed by Andre De Toth, The House of Wax was a remake of 1933’s Mystery in the Wax Museum. The film told the story of Henry Jarrod (Price), a sculptor who goes insane after his partner burns their wax museum to the ground in order to collect the insurance payout. Jarrod survives the fire and later opens his own wax museum, featuring an exhibit immortalizing crimes past and present, including the murder of his ex-partner by a mysterious disfigured killer. The film’s heroine, played by Phyllis Kirk, eventually discovers that Jarrod himself is the killer, and that the museum’s “sculptures” are all the wax-covered bodies of his victims.

The 3-D filming process involved using two cameras, or a single twin-lensed camera, to represent both the right and the left eye of the human viewer. Images from the two cameras were then projected simultaneously onto the screen. Moviegoers had to view The House of Wax through special stereoscopic glasses to see its full 3-D effect. The lenses were specially tinted so that the viewer would see the right- and left-eye images only with the eyes for which they were intended. The 3-D process proved especially effective during the film’s climactic chase scene, in which the cloaked killer pursues Kirk’s character through a series of gas-lit streets and alleyways, with the viewer following along behind them.

The House of Wax launched Price on his long and successful career as a star of horror movies. It also jump-started the career of Charles Buchinsky, who played the supporting role of Jarrod’s mute servant; he would go on to achieve international fame as Charles Bronson, star of innumerable action movies. Earning an impressive (by 1953 standards) $4.3 million at the box office, the movie sparked an explosion of similar 3-D thrillers, including The Mad Magician (1954), also starring Price. 

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First Harry Potter film opens

Year
2001
Month Day
November 16

On November 16, 2001, the British author J.K. Rowling’s star creation—bespectacled boy wizard Harry Potter—makes his big-screen debut in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, which opens in movie theaters across the United States. Based on the mega-best-selling fantasy novel of the same name, the film, which starred Daniel Radcliffe in the title role, went on to become one of the highest-grossing movies in history.

The first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, debuted in Great Britain in 1997 and was released in the United States the following year under the name Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Children and adults alike were captivated by the story of Harry, his friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, their adventures at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and Harry’s struggles against his main enemy, the evil Lord Voldemort.

Rowling, who was born in England in 1965, first got the idea for Harry Potter while she was riding a train from Manchester to London in 1990. She began writing the first book that night and finished it while living in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she struggled financially as a single mother and battled depression. Her completed manuscript was turned down by a number of publishers before she got a book deal with Bloomsbury Publishing in August 1996. Rowling went on to pen a total of seven Harry Potter novels, all of which became international blockbusters, selling more than 400 million copies and being translated into some 60 languages in all. The books also spawned a series of movies, video games and other merchandise that made Rowling one of the wealthiest people in the entertainment industry.

The first Harry Potter film was directed by the American filmmaker Chris Columbus, whose previous credits included Home Alone and Mrs. Doubtfire. Prior to being selected to play Harry, Daniel Radcliffe, who was born July 23, 1989, in London, had appeared in a BBC production of David Copperfield as well as the 2001 film The Tailor of Panama, which starred Pierce Brosnan. British actors Rupert Grint and Emma Watson were chosen for the roles of Harry’s friends Ron and Hermione. A roster of celebrated actors took supporting roles in the film and its various sequels, including Ralph Fiennes, Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson, Richard Harris and Gary Oldman.

Columbus also directed the second Potter film, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which was released in 2002. The Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron helmed the third film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which arrived in theaters in 2004. The fourth film, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, was directed by Mike Newell and debuted in 2005, while 2007 saw the release of the fifth film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, helmed by David Yates. The sixth Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, also directed by Yates, opened in 2009. The seventh and final novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, debuted in U.S. bookstores in July 21, 2007. It became two movies, released in two parts in 2010 and 2011. 

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First Blockbuster store opens

Year
1985
Month Day
October 19

On October 19, 1985, the first Blockbuster video-rental store opens, in Dallas, Texas. At a time when most video stores were small-scale operations featuring a limited selection of titles, Blockbuster opened with some 8,000 tapes displayed on shelves around the store and a computerized check-out process. The first store was a success and Blockbuster expanded rapidly, eventually becoming one of the world’s largest providers of in-home movies and game entertainment, before eventually filing for bankruptcy in 2010.

Blockbuster was founded by David Cook, who had previously owned a business that provided computer software services to the oil and gas industry in Texas. Cook saw the potential in the video-rental business and after opening the first Blockbuster in 1985, he added three more stores the following year. In 1987, he sold part of the business to a group of investors that included Wayne Huizenga, founder of Waste Management, Inc., the world’s biggest garbage disposal company. Later that year, Cook left Blockbuster and Huizenga assumed control of the company and moved its headquarters to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Under Huizenga’s leadership, Blockbuster embarked on an aggressive expansion plan, snapping up existing video store chains and opening scores of new stores. By 1988, Blockbuster was America’s leading video chain, with some 400 stores. By the early 1990s, Blockbuster had launched its 1,000th store and expanded into the overseas market.

In 1994, Blockbuster was acquired by the media giant Viacom Inc., whose brands include MTV and Nickelodeon. In the mid-1990s, the digital video disc (DVD) made its debut and in 1997, Netflix, an online DVD rental service, was founded. Around that same time, the e-commerce giant Amazon.com launched a video and DVD store. Blockbuster faced additional competition from the rise of pay-per-view and on-demand movie services, through which viewers could pay for and watch movies instantly in their own homes. In 2004, Blockbuster split off from Viacom. That same year, Blockbuster launched an online DVD rental service to compete with Netflix. The venture was not successful. On September 23, 2010, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. By 2014, the last of the company-owned stores had closed. 

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