Sitcom actress murdered; death prompts anti-stalking legislation

Year
1989
Month Day
July 18

On July 18, 1989, the 21-year-old actress Rebecca Schaeffer is murdered at her Los Angeles home by Robert John Bardo, a mentally unstable man who had been stalking her. Schaeffer’s death helped lead to the passage in California of legislation aimed at preventing stalking.

Schaeffer was born November 6, 1967, in Eugene, Oregon. She worked as a teenage model and had a short stint on the daytime soap opera One Life to Live, but was best known for co-starring with Pam Dawber in the television sitcom My Sister Sam. Bardo, born in 1970, had written Schaeffer letters and unsuccessfully tried to gain access to the set of My Sister Sam, before showing up at her apartment on July 18, 1989. The obsessed fan had reportedly obtained the actress’s home address through a detective agency, which located it through records at the California Department of Motor Vehicles. On the day of the murder, Schaeffer reportedly complied with Bardo’s request for an autograph when he appeared at her home and then asked him to leave. He returned a short time later and the actress, who reportedly was waiting for someone to deliver a script, answered the door again. Bardo then shot and killed her.

Arrested the next day in Tucson, Arizona, Bardo was later prosecuted by the Los Angeles County district attorney Marcia Clark, who later became famous as a prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson trial. In 1991, Bardo was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In 1994, California passed the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, which prevented the Department of Motor Vehicles from releasing private addresses.

The 2002 film Moonlight Mile, loosely inspired by Schaeffer’s story, was written and directed by Brad Silberling, who had been dating the young actress at the time of her death.

Source

Julia Roberts collects $20 million for Erin Brockovich


Year
2000
Month Day
March 17

With Erin Brockovich, released on March 17, 2000, Julia Roberts becomes the first actress ever to command $20 million per movie.

Born in Smyrna, Georgia, on October 28, 1967, Roberts followed her brother Eric into acting, making her film debut in 1988’s girl-band drama Satisfaction. Her bona-fide breakout onto Hollywood’s A-list came in 1990, with the release of the box-office smash Pretty Woman. As Vivian Ward, a Hollywood Boulevard prostitute who charms a wealthy businessman (Richard Gere) into a happily-ever-after ending, Roberts grinned her way to her first Best Actress Oscar nomination. She had previously snagged an Academy Award nomination, in the Best Supporting Actress category, for her performance in the 1989 tear-jerker Steel Magnolias.

After another blockbuster (1993’s The Pelican Brief) and a string of relative disappointments (including 1996’s Mary Reilly), Roberts returned with a box-office bang in My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), in which she deftly upended her “America’s sweetheart” reputation by playing a character who desperately schemes to steal another woman’s fiancee., In 1999, Roberts made two more high-profile romantic comedies, Notting Hill and The Runaway Bride, which re-teamed her with Gere; though critics panned the latter film, both were huge hits.

Roberts then signed on for the title role in the director Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich.

By that time, $20 million had become the standard paycheck for Hollywood’s A-list male movie stars, including Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise and Sylvester Stallone, among others. Roberts was the first female performer to command this amount. As was reported in Newsweek at the time of Erin Brockovich’s release, Universal Pictures was initially reluctant to hand Roberts her record-breaking paycheck. Her agent, Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, reportedly convinced the studio by pointing out the injustice of Hollywood’s double standard. With five movies that grossed more than $100 million, Goldsmith-Thomas argued, Roberts was well worth the same paycheck as male stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio or Adam Sandler, each of whom had commanded $20 million after scoring only one hit of that magnitude.

Roberts’ Erin Brockovich haul put her far out in front of her closest peers at the time, Meg Ryan and Jodie Foster, who had reportedly each made $15 million for a single movie. In Erin Brockovich, Roberts proved worthy of her enormous paycheck, leading the film to more than $125 million at the U.S. box office and five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. Dressed in black-and-white vintage Valentino, a tearful and triumphant Roberts took home the statuette for Best Actress at the 73rd annual Academy Awards. 

Source

“Spider-Man” becomes first movie to top $100 million in opening weekend

Year
2002
Month Day
May 05

Directed by Sam Raimi and starring Tobey Maguire in the title role, the eagerly awaited comic book adaptation Spider-Man was released on Friday, May 3, 2002, and quickly became the fastest movie ever to earn more than $100 million at the box office, raking in a staggering $114.8 million by Sunday, May 5.

After a genetically altered spider bites the teenager Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) during his class field trip to a university laboratory, he discovers that the bite has given him supernatural powers. Though his principal goal is pursuing his longtime crush, Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), Parker soon transforms himself into Spider-Man in order to combat evil, in the form of the Green Goblin, the villainous result of an experiment that the scientist Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe) has performed on himself.

By the time the film was released, four decades had passed since Stan Lee and Steve Ditko created Spider-Man for Marvel in 1962. The comic’s enduring popularity, as well as a massive marketing campaign by Columbia Pictures and Marvel, seemed to predict commercial success for Spider-Man, which opened in more than 3,600 theaters nationwide. In addition, super-hero movies traditionally faired well at the box office, as evidenced by the hit Superman and Batman films. Reviewers also praised Raimi’s film for its smart script and generally good acting, as well as its high-tech special effects. The combination of all these factors helped explain Spider-Man’s record opening-day haul of $39.4 million. The previous mark was $32.3 million, set by Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in 2001. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone had taken five days to pass the $100 million mark, as had 1999’s Stars Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace. Spider-Man would go on to earn some $403.7 million domestically, more than any other comic book movie to that date.

Both Spider-Man sequels, in 2004 and 2007, would break their predecessor’s opening day record, earning $40.4 million and $59 million, respectively. Spider-Man 3, shown on more than 10,000 screens at 4,252 locations, boasted an opening weekend haul of $151.1 million. That record would stand until July 2008, when The Dark Knight, the fifth film in the Batman franchise, grossed $155 million in its first weekend. Only 19 days after its release, The Dark Knight had taken in $405.7 million in the United States alone, passing the first Spider-Man. 

Source

Government gives Chrysler $1.5 billion loan

Year
1980
Month Day
May 10

On May 10, 1980, United States Secretary of the Treasury G. William Miller announces the approval of nearly $1.5 billion dollars in federal loan guarantees for the nearly bankrupt Chrysler Corporation. At the time, it was the largest rescue package ever granted by the U.S. government to an American corporation.

Founded as the Maxwell Motor Company Inc. in 1913, Chrysler grew into the Chrysler Corporation after 1925, when Walter P. Chrysler took over control of the company. Its purchase of Dodge Brothers in 1928 announced Chrysler’s arrival as a major force in the U.S. automotive industry. After decades of expansion, the company’s success came to a screeching halt after the 1973 oil crisis led to skyrocketing gas costs and new government standards for emissions. The combination of these factors caused problems for the Big Three of American automakers–Ford, General Motors and Chrysler–as the trend towards so-called “muscle cars” in the 1960s had led them to produce vehicles with powerful, gas-guzzling engines. (Chrysler’s famous Hemi engine, used in cars like the Dodge Charger and Challenger and the Plymouth RoadRunner, was one of the most prominent examples.)

In an attempt to produce lighter, more efficient vehicles, Chrysler bought shares in the Japanese motor company Mitsubishi, which began producing subcompact cars in America under the Chrysler name in 1970. By the end of the decade, however, Chrysler was in dire financial straits. Lee Iacocca, the former Ford executive who became the company’s president and chairman of the board in 1978, appealed for a federal loan, banking on the fact that the government wouldn’t allow the country’s No. 3 automaker to declare bankruptcy in an already depressed economy. His gamble paid off: In explaining the decision to grant the loans to Chrysler, Treasury Secretary Miller stated that the government “recognizes that there is a public interest in sustaining [its] jobs and maintaining a strong and competitive national automotive industry.”

The terms of the $1.5 billion in loans required Chrysler to raise another $2 billion on its own, which Iacocca did by streamlining operations and persuading union leaders to accept some layoffs and wage cuts, among other measures. His high-profile personal leadership, combined with a focus on more fuel-efficient vehicles, steered Chrysler to one of the most famous corporate comebacks in recent history: In 1984, a year after paying off its government loans ahead of schedule, the company posted record profits of some $2.4 billion. Twenty-five years later, however, plummeting sales and a deepening global financial crisis landed Chrysler in trouble again, and in early 2009 the company received another $4 billion in federal funds. Soon after, under pressure from President Barack Obama’s administration, Chrysler filed for federal bankruptcy protection and entered into a partnership with the Italian automaker Fiat.

Source

Layne Hall is born; will become oldest licensed driver in United States


Updated:
Original:
Year
1880
Month Day
December 25

On December 25 1880, Layne Hall is born in Mississippi. Some records indicate that he was actually born in 1884; either way, when he died in November 1990, Hall was the oldest licensed driver in the United States.

In 1916, Hall moved north to Silvercreek, New York, just west of Buffalo. When he arrived, his nephew taught him to drive, and he got his first license that fall. In his nearly 75 years on the road, Hall never got a speeding ticket or citation of any kind. In January 1990, the New York State Commissioner of Motor Vehicles wrote Hall a letter commending him for his lifetime of safe driving.

Hall continued to drive his blue 1962 Cadillac Sedan de Ville sedan–to the grocery store, to the doctor’s office, to visit friends and even to go on dates–until he died on November 20, 1990. His accomplishment won him a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records. (He displaced Mrs. Maude Tull of Inglewood, California., who remained behind the wheel until she was 104. Tull died in 1976.)

Though Hall had an exemplary driving record, many older drivers are not so lucky. In 2004, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were more than 28 million licensed drivers over the age of 65 in the United States, and many of them suffer from what the CDC called “age-related decreases in vision, cognitive functions, and physical impairments” that makes it difficult and even dangerous for them to get behind the wheel. As a result–though the CDC study did note that older people were more likely to wear safety belts and less likely to drink and drive than any other group–older drivers have what the agency called “higher crash death rates per mile driven” than every group except inexperienced teen drivers.

Source

Valentino dies

Year
1926
Month Day
August 23

The death of silent-screen idol Rudolph Valentino at the age of 31 sends his fans into a hysterical state of mass mourning. In his brief film career, the Italian-born actor established a reputation as the archetypal screen lover. After his death from a ruptured ulcer was announced, dozens of suicide attempts were reported, and the actress Pola Negri—Valentino’s most recent lover—was said to be inconsolable. Tens of thousands of people paid tribute at his open coffin in New York City, and 100,000 mourners lined the streets outside the church where funeral services were held. Valentino’s body then traveled by train to Hollywood, where he was laid to rest after another funeral.

Rudolph Valentino was born Rodolfo Guglielmi in Castellaneta, Italy, in 1895. He immigrated to the United States in 1913 and worked as a gardener, dishwasher, waiter, and gigolo before building a minor career as a vaudeville dancer. In 1917, he went to Hollywood and appeared as a dancer in the movie Alimony. Valentino became known to casting directors as a reliable Latin villain type, and he appeared in a series of small parts before winning a leading role in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). The film, which featured a memorable scene of Valentino dancing the tango, made the rakishly handsome Italian an overnight sensation. His popularity soared with romantic dramas such as The Sheik (1921), Blood and Sand (1922) and The Eagle (1925).

Valentino was Hollywood’s first male sex symbol, and millions of female fans idolized him as the “Great Lover.” His personal life was often stormy, and after two failed marriages he began dating the sexy Polish actress Pola Negri in 1926. Shortly after his final film, The Son of the Sheik, opened, in August 1926, he was hospitalized in New York because of a ruptured ulcer. Fans stood in a teary-eyed vigil outside Polyclinic Hospital for a week, but shortly after 12 p.m. on August 23 he succumbed to infection.

Valentino lay in state for several days at Frank E. Campbell’s funeral home at Broadway and 66th St., and thousands of mourners rioted, smashed windows, and fought with police to get a glimpse of the deceased star. Standing guard by the coffin were four Fascists, allegedly sent by Italian leader Benito Mussolini but in fact hired by Frank Campbell’s press agent. On August 30, a funeral was held at St. Malachy’s Church on W. 49th St., and a number of Hollywood notables turned out, among them Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Gloria Swanson. Pola Negri appointed herself chief mourner and obligingly fainted for photographers several times between the train station and the chapel. She collapsed in a dead faint again beside Valentino’s bier, where she had installed a massive flower arrangement that spelled out the word POLA.

Valentino’s body was shipped to Hollywood, where another funeral was held for him at the Church of the Good Shepherd on September 14. He then was finally laid to rest in a crypt donated by his friend June Mathis in Hollywood Memorial Park. Each year on the anniversary of his death, a mysterious “Lady in Black” appeared at his tomb and left a single red rose. She was later joined by other, as many as a dozen, “Ladies in Black.” The identity of the original Lady in Black is disputed, but the most convincing claimant is Ditra Flame, who said that Valentino visited her in the hospital when she was deathly ill at age 14, bringing her a red rose. Flame said she kept up her annual pilgrimage for three decades and then abandoned the practice when multiple imitators started showing up.

Source

Stanley Kubrick dies


Year
1999
Month Day
March 07

On March 7, 1999, American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick dies in Hertfordshire, England, at the age of 70. One of the most acclaimed film directors of the 20th century, Kubrick’s 13 feature films explored the dark side of human nature.

Born in New York City in 1928, Kubrick took up photography in high school and became a staff photographer for Look magazine at age 17. A photo assignment on boxing inspired him to make The Day of the Fight, a short documentary film about boxing, in 1951. The short was bought by a news service, and he made two more documentaries before making a short feature-length film, Fear and Desire (1953), which dealt with war. The movie, produced independently, received little attention outside New York, where critics praised Kubrick’s directorial talents.

Kubrick’s next two feature films, Killer’s Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956), brought him to the attention of Hollywood, and in 1957 he directed actor Kirk Douglas in Paths of Glory, a story of military injustice in the French army during World War I. Douglas later enlisted Kubrick to take over production of Spartacus (1960), a historical epic about the slave rebellion led by the Roman slave Spartacus in 73 B.C. The film was a box office smash and won four Academy Awards, including Best Cinematography, which was attributed to Russell Metty but was largely Kubrick’s work. Behind the scenes, the director’s characteristic obsession with detail created some tension with the cast and crew.

After Spartacus, he moved permanently to England, where he directed Lolita (1962), based on the controversial novel by Vladimir Nabokov. Two years later, Kubrick scored another major critical and commercial hit with Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Starring Peter Sellers and George C. Scott, Dr. Strangelove was a dark comedy about the nuclear arms race that earned Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Direction, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor (Peter Sellers).

Kubrick spent four years working on his next film, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), co-written with English writer Arthur C. Clarke. Now widely regarded as the greatest science fiction film ever made, 2001: A Space Odyssey won Kubrick a well-deserved Best Visual Effects Academy Award. Kubrick followed up 2001 with A Clockwork Orange (1971), a controversial social commentary set in the near future. It was given an X rating in the United States for its extreme violence and banned in the United Kingdom, but nonetheless received four Oscar nominations including Best Picture.

Barry Lyndon (1975) was a picturesque movie based on the 19th-century novel by William Thackeray. Kubrick, who had become famous for his perfectionist tendencies, took a record 300 days just to shoot the film. The Shining (1980), starring Jack Nicholson as the caretaker of a mountain resort who goes insane, was hailed as a masterpiece of the horror genre. Full Metal Jacket (1987) addressed the Vietnam War and was another critical and commercial success. In 1997, after a 10-year absence from filmmaking, Kubrick began work on Eyes Wide Shut (1999), an enigmatic thriller starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. The director died soon after turning in his final cut of the film.

READ MORE: 11 Things You Didn’t Know About ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’

Source

First Cannes Film Festival

Year
1946
Month Day
September 20

The first annual Cannes Film Festival opens at the resort city of Cannes on the French Riviera. The festival had intended to make its debut in September 1939, but the outbreak of World War II forced the cancellation of the inaugural Cannes.

The world’s first annual international film festival was inaugurated at Venice in 1932. By 1938, the Venice Film Festival had become a vehicle for Fascist and Nazi propaganda, with Benito Mussolini’s Italy and Adolf Hitler’s Germany dictating the choices of films and sharing the prizes among themselves. Outraged, France decided to organize an alternative film festival. In June 1939, the establishment of a film festival at Cannes, to be held from September 1 to 20, was announced in Paris. Cannes, an elegant beach city, lies southeast of Nice on the Mediterranean coast. One of the resort town’s casinos agreed to host the event.

Films were selected and the filmmakers and stars began arriving in mid-August. Among the American selections was The Wizard of Oz. France offered The Nigerian, and Poland The Black Diamond. The USSR brought the aptly titled Tomorrow, It’s War. On the morning of September 1, the day the festival was to begin, Hitler invaded Poland. In Paris, the French government ordered a general mobilization, and the Cannes festival was called off after the screening of just one film: German American director William Dieterle’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Two days later, France and Britain declared war on Germany.

World War II lasted six long years. In 1946, France’s provincial government approved a revival of the Festival de Cannes as a means of luring tourists back to the French Riviera. The festival began on September 20, 1946, and 18 nations were represented. The festival schedule included Austrian American director Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, Italian director Roberto Rossellini’s Open City, French director René Clement’s The Battle of the Rails, and British director David Lean’s Brief Encounter. At the first Cannes, organizers placed more emphasis on creative stimulation between national productions than on competition. Nine films were honored with the top award: Grand Prix du Festival.

The Cannes Film Festival stumbled through its early years; the 1948 and 1950 festivals were canceled for economic reasons. In 1952, the Palais des Festivals was dedicated as a permanent home for the festival, and in 1955, the Palme d’Or (Golden Palm) award for best film of the festival was introduced, an allusion to the palm-planted Promenade de la Croisette that parallels Cannes’ celebrated beach. In the 1950s, the Festival International du Film de Cannes came to be regarded as the most prestigious film festival in the world. It still holds that allure today, though many have criticized it as overly commercial. More than 30,000 people come to Cannes each May to attend the festival, about 100 times the number of film devotees who showed up for the first Cannes in 1946.

Source

Sit-down strike begins in Flint


Updated:
Original:
Year
1936
Month Day
December 30

At 8 p.m. on December 30, 1936, in one of the first sit-down strikes in the United States, autoworkers occupy the General Motors Fisher Body Plant Number One in Flint, Michigan. The autoworkers were striking to win recognition of the United Auto Workers (UAW) as the only bargaining agent for GM’s workers; they also wanted to make the company stop sending work to non-union plants and to establish a fair minimum wage scale, a grievance system and a set of procedures that would help protect assembly-line workers from injury. In all, the strike lasted 44 days.

READ MORE: The 1936 Strike That Brought America’s Most Powerful Automaker to its Knees

The Flint sit-down strike was not spontaneous; UAW leaders, inspired by similar strikes across Europe, had been planning it for months. The strike actually began at smaller plants: Fisher Body in Atlanta on November 16, GM in Kansas City on December 16 and a Fisher stamping plant in Cleveland on December 28. The Flint plant was the biggest coup, however: it contained one of just two sets of body dies that GM used to stamp out almost every one of its 1937 cars. By seizing control of the Flint plant, autoworkers could shut down the company almost entirely.

So, on the evening of December 30, the Flint Plant’s night shift simply stopped working. They locked themselves in and sat down. “She’s ours!” one worker shouted.

GM argued that the strikers were trespassing and got a court order demanding their evacuation; still, the union men stayed put. GM turned off the heat in the buildings, but the strikers wrapped themselves in coats and blankets and hunkered down. On January 11, police tried to cut off the strikers’ food supply; in the resulting riot, known as the “Battle of the Running Bulls,” 16 workers and 11 policemen were injured and the UAW took over the adjacent Fisher Two plant. On February 1, the UAW won control of the enormous Chevrolet No. 4 engine factory. GM’s output went from a robust 50,000 cars in December to just 125 in February.

Despite GM’s enormous political clout, Michigan Governor Frank Murphy refused to use force to break the strike. Though the sit-ins were illegal, he believed, he also believed that authorizing the National Guard to break the strike would be an enormous mistake. “If I send those soldiers right in on the men,” he said, “there’d be no telling how many would be killed.” As a result, he declared, “The state authorities will not take sides. They are here only to protect the public peace.”

Meanwhile, President Roosevelt urged GM to recognize the union so that the plants could reopen. In mid-February, the automaker signed an agreement with the UAW. Among other things, the workers were given a 5 percent raise and permission to speak in the lunchroom.

Source

O.J. Simpson leads L.A. police on a low-speed chase

Year
1994
Month Day
June 17

Viewers across the nation are glued to their television screens on June 17, 1994, watching as a fleet of black-and-white police cars pursues a white Ford Bronco along Interstate 405 in Los Angeles, California. Inside the Bronco is Orenthal James “O.J.” Simpson, a former professional football player, actor and sports commentator whom police suspected of involvement in the recent murders of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.

READ MORE: O.J. Simpson’s Getaway Car: What Happened to the White Ford Bronco? 

The bodies of Brown Simpson and Goldman were found outside her home in the exclusive Los Angeles neighborhood of Brentwood shortly after midnight on June 13, 1994. Bloodstains matching Simpson’s blood type were found at the crime scene, and the star had become the focus of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) investigation by the morning of June 17. When police arrived to arrest Simpson at the home of his friend and lawyer, Robert Kardashian, they found that Simpson had slipped out the back door with his former college and Buffalo Bills teammate Al Cowlings. The two men had then driven off in Cowlings’ white Ford Bronco.

After a news conference–in which his lawyer, Howard Shapiro, announced that Simpson was distraught and might attempt suicide–the LAPD officially declared the former football star a fugitive. Around 7 p.m. PST, police located the white Bronco by tracing calls made from Simpson’s cellular phone. Simpson was reported to be in the back seat of the vehicle, holding a gun to his head. With news helicopters following the slow chase from above and cameras broadcasting the dramatic events live to millions of astonished viewers, vehicles from the LAPD and California Highway Patrol pursued the Bronco for about an hour as it traveled at some 35 miles per hour along I-405. Finally, after about an hour, the Bronco pulled into the driveway of Simpson’s Brentwood home. He emerged from the car close to 9 pm and was immediately arrested and booked on double murder charges.

The trial that followed gripped the nation, inspiring unprecedented media scrutiny along with heated debates about racial discrimination on the part of the police. Though a jury acquitted Simpson of the murder charges in October 1995, a separate civil trial in 1997 found him liable for the deaths and ordered him to pay $33.5 million in damages to the Brown and Goldman families.

READ MORE: O.J. Simpson Murder Case: A Timeline of the ‘Trial of the Century’

In 2007, Simpson ran into legal problems once again when he was arrested for breaking into a Las Vegas hotel room and taking sports memorabilia, which he claimed had been stolen from him, at gunpoint. On October 3, 2008, he was found guilty of 12 charges related to the incident, including armed robbery and kidnapping, and sentenced to 33 years in prison. He was released from prison in October, 2017. 

Source