Robert Lees, a 91-year-old Hollywood writer, who wrote episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (as well as the movies The Black Cat, The Invisible Woman and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein), was beheaded by a crazed homeless person—yikes! Story here.
Someone lives to 91 years old and then is beheaded? Ick.
Enlighten me, Eve–What’s the Norma Desmond reference?
I’m not Eve but am considering it for Halloween.
In Sunset Boulevard Norma Desmond initiates what turns into a very unhealthy relationship with her screenwriter, whom she ultimately murders (not by beheading, however).
Norma Desmond killed a screenwriter in “Sunset Boulevard”.
You know, it’s a terrible thing to say, but if I get to 91, I hope I get to go out so memorably.
Oh. I thought I was missing a Sunset Boulevard reference, something which would be disheartening for this Andrew Lloyd Webber fanatic.
He wrote Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein? Beheading seems … fair.
Norma Desmond asks the writer to polish her own screenplay of Salome. She helped John the Baptist get his head cut off.
Yeah, but he also wrote The Black Cat. So beheading seems vastly unfair, though somehow apt . . .
Jesus, all of his film credits seem weirdly prescient: How to Start the Day . . . The Story of Doctor Carver . . . Hold That Ghost . . . Crazy House . . .
(okay, maybe not Juke Box Jenny or Holiday in Havana)
Oh, great. So now beheading is this season’s fashion for murders. What next, an arsenic revival?
You’ve obviously never been to Havana.
The question is, did it happen when he was exiting a screening of The Bicycle Thief?
Evil Captor, you don’t like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein? Maybe you don’t like Abbott and Costello, period?
lissener the Black Cat that Robert Lees wrote isn’t the bizarre, fascinating Karloff-Lugosi film of 1934, but a forgettable old dark house pic from 1941.
The LA police have picked up a suspect. The guards at Paramont Studios had turned away a man who was acting strangely, then saw his photo on the televised press conference re: the murders. See CNN.
I guess he’ll be joining Jayne Mansfield in heaven.
But the point of that Snopes article was that Jayne Mansfield wasn’t decapitated. She was, er, scalped.
Can’t speak for Evil Captor, but I’m an A + C nut. . . .Meet Frankenstein, like several others they did in the late 40s/early 50s, was blatant commercial schtick, made to capitalize on the hugely popular monster movies of the period. Hardly A + C’s most inspired comic work.
Give me anything up until about 1946 with those guys. After that they were just cashing checks.
From the musical version:
Norma (to her own doomed screenwriter): *
Have you got to the scene
where she asks for his head?
If she can’t have him living,
she’ll take him dead.
They bring in his head on a silver tray.
She kisses his mouth, it’s a great screenplay!*
I’m kinda neutral on Abbott & Costello – most of their stuff seems to be schtick. But I have seen Abott & Costello Meet Frankenstein and the Wolfman and it’s kinda stupid and dull.
Heh. I love the Dope – we get the Billy Wilder and Robert Altman references. CNN sticks to last year’s rehash of the “buddy cop” crapfest for their film reference for the story. Plebians.