I’d imagine most comic strip artists toil in relative (or complete) anonymity, even super-popular ones like Bill Watterson or Berke Breathed. If I bumped into either one of those two at a party I’d have no idea, and I’ve read every comic either of them has ever published. I doubt I could even pick Charles Schulz out of a lineup.
And in that vein, “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.”
Most people are aware of the most famous workof Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. Few could come up with his name, I would think.
Victor Fleming. He directed some of Hollywood’s greatest movies but many people don’t know his name.
That is a good one. I knew he was because I was shocked when I noticed that he directed both Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz that came out in the same year (1939). He was essentially competing with himself for the Best Director Academy Award (he won just as he would have almost any year). I don’t know why he isn’t more famous.
Mostly because that, other than GWTW and Oz, the rest of Fleming’s output was undistingushed. He did do the Spencer Tracy Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but nothing much that people remember today. He was a competent studio director (much like Sam Wood), but not a great one.
I’ll mention Frank Oz. He’s very successful as a performer (most notably the person behind Miss Piggy, Fozzy Bear, and Yoda) and directed some nice and underrated comedies.
Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln? Your standards are really high. I understand that studio directors from that period aren’t the same as directors today because they mainly just handled day to day management rather than overall vision but that is plenty. He is still the only director in the world to have two movies in many top-ten of all time lists yet most people have never heard of him. It is incredible that he could direct them both almost simultaneously especially because they are completely different styles.
<shrug>Sam Wood directed A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, two classic, plus Goodbye Mr. Chips He’s not a great director either. In the case of Fleming, the success of the films have little to do with his direction. Like Wood, he was in the right place at the right time.
There were studio directors who were far better, like Michael Curtis: * Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy * (both in the same year) *The Adventures of Robin Hood’ , Angels with Dirty Faces * and other Bogart films.
Or an even better candidate, Howard Hawks, who created classic westerns, comedies, film noir, and possibly science fiction. He was underrated while he was at his peak, was recognized toward the end of his career, but now is overlooked again. But he did *Bringing Up Baby, Red River, The Big Sleep,Scarface, Red River, the Thing * (possibly) and many more film classics.
Scabpicker @ #17: I read a HUGE biography of Grant Wood not long ago. Poor bastard was a closeted homosexual who ended up marrying a beard, becoming an alcoholic, and dying young.
He studied art for several years in Europe as a young man, probably indulged his natural sexuality, but ended up coming back to Iowa and jumping back into the closet. His painting “Return from Bohemia” is simultaneously sad and eerie, the ghostly images of the rural types and the farm barn looming over the artist.
Living in New York, I can go see his “Paul Revere’s Ride” at the Met any time I want. He has Paul riding his horse over a modern, 1930s style highway instead of an 18th century rutted path. The house are BRIGHTLY lit, as if by electricity rather than oil lamps or candles. God knows what he was thinking…
Jeff Barry, one of the most prolific pop songwriters of all time.
He wrote about a zillion songs, many, many of which were hits. He started his career writing with Ellie Greenwich, and worked with many other writers (and wrote plenty of songs by himself).
A (very) partial list of songs he wrote:
Da Doo Ron Ron
Not Too Young to Get Married
Then He Kissed Me
Be My Baby
Do-Wah-Diddy
Chapel of Love
Leader of the Pack
River Deep - Mountain High
Sugar, Sugar
Montego Bay
I Honestly Love You
I Can Hear Music
That’s about a dozen out of (probably) thousands.
I always think it’s interesting that we all know actors, many of us know a lot of directors, especially if they directed a lot of our favorite/popular movies. But how many people can tell you who wrote, created a movie? Sure, if the movie came from a book, the author may see some publicity from it, but if someone wrote it for the screen, it’s the typically the director that gets the fame, not the writer/screenwriter. That always seemed odd to me.
Again with music, there’s plenty of people who just sit in the background and churn out pop songs, tin pan alley style. If one were to look at the liner notes for all the pop songs on the Hot 100 list for the last 20 years, I’d be willing to bet a lot of the same writers would pop up over and over. Similarly, it’s often not until a famous musician dies that we hear (especially if you were only a casual fan) of the scores of other music they wrote. For a recent example, just look at Prince.
They do, and a lot of them are famous. Like Max Martin, Dr Luke, Sia, Dianne Warren, The Matrix.
Prince was known while he was alive as a prolific songwriter. I’m not sure what became more well known when he died, but I knew when I was 6 years old that he wrote “Manic Monday” and it was well publicized that he wrote Nothing Compares 2 U which was a hit when I was 12, and all about the Time, working w/ Sheena Easton, all his various girl groups, etc.
Wow, they certainly didn’t cover that part in art history. Some teachers would get into the personal lives of the artists, but for the most part it was left out.
That seems to be a perceptive interpretation of that painting. I’m not sure if they neglected that work in AH because it kind of has a narrative quality that was strongly discouraged at the time I was in school, or if they just didn’t want to deal with the complex situation he was in through a classroom setting.
And now that I cheat and look up his list of works, I actually do know Parson Weems’ Fable, very well. I see it pretty regularly at the Amon Carter museum in town.
It kind of has the same quirkiness that The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere has. It’s idyllic to the point where reality is taking a back seat to the story. I’m relatively sure that George Washington at 8 looked almost nothing like he does on the Quarter; but there he is, three feet tall and already recognizable.
Yeah, I’ve found all of the Grant Wood paintings pointed out in this thread very cool! I have seen the original American Gothic many times at the Art Institute of Chicago. I actually did know who did that painting, as my father told me once, and it stuck in my head.
Thanks, guys, I’ve learned a bunch in this thread.
Man, I like the museums in my metro area, but Chi and NYC kind of take the cake. Walking around the corner and being face-to-face with Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks is a moment that still shakes me up in retrospect.
And that’s another I’ll add to the thread. That painting has been popularized to the point where it’s sometimes used as a platform for kitsch. I imagine that the number of people who can recognize the artist or can remember another of their works is somewhere around the same as the number who recognize Grant Wood.
First of all, it’s Lloyd Webber and Rice.
Second of all, Tim Rice only wrote the lyrics for five of Lloyd Webber’s shows: Th Likes of Us, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, evita and Cricket. They have since parted ways, and have not worked on any major shows together.
I agree that Tim Rice is one of the best lyricists going, and deserves more fame. In addition to the above, he did Blondel, Chess, and the Lion King.
Tubular Bells, the theme to The Exorcist, is pretty widely known. It was performed by Mike Oldfield when he was 19. He went on to release 30 more pop and classical albums, but he’s not exactly a household name.
+1 for Hal Blaine, as well as a number of other members of The Wrecking Crew. I was thinking about Blaine while driving home from work a couple of weeks ago, and thought that a SD thread about unsung studio musicians might be fun. Granted, The Wrecking Crew, The Funk Brothers, and The Swampers have all gotten much-deserved attention in the last 10-15 years because of documentaries, but there are plenty more session artists who haven’t gotten much acclaim.
Like my contribution to the thread: Blaine’s protégé, Jim Gordon – a studio drummer who played on Mason Williams’ Classical Gas and Nilsson’s Jump Into the Fire, and was a member of Derek and the Dominoes (he played the piano coda for Layla) and of The Incredible Bongo Band, which recorded Apache, one of the most-sampled songs in rap music.
Gordon’s discography as a session drummer is impressive – he’s on Pet Sounds, Mad Dogs & Englishmen (he toured with Joe Cocker), All Things Must Pass, The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys, Pretzel Logic … the list goes on and on.
Sadly, he’s schizophrenic and has been incarcerated since 1984 (he murdered his mother). Really tragic story.
The Statue of Liberty is extremely famous. Its creator, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, is not.
The Venus de Milo is one of the world’s best known statues. The sculptor who carved her (Alexander of Antioch, by some accounts) is unknown to most people.
See post 23.