Leslie Nielsen, whose career was revived by his starring role in Airplane, was the younger brother of Erik Nielsen, Deputy Prime Minister of Canada. During Erik’s time in office, Leslie Nielsen and many other actors of Canadian origin appeared in The Canadian Conspiracy, a mockumentary about a supposed conspiracy to infiltrate American culture through the entertainment industry.
Canadian and Canadian-American film and TV personalities appearing in the film include Lorne Greene, Lorne Michaels, John Candy, Tommy Chong, Peter Jennings, Margot Kidder, Anne Murray, William Shatner, Martin Short and Donald Sutherland,.
Paul Anka, who was born in 1941 in Ottawa, Ontario, recorded and released the song “Diana” in 1957. It went to #1 on both the American and Canadian music charts, and remains one of the best-selling singles ever recorded by a Canadian artist. In 1958, at the age of 17, he had four more singles in the Top 20.
Paul Anka wrote the theme song for The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, entitled “Johnny’s Theme.”
Anka, who was 21 years old at the time, based the song on an earlier song he had written, which went by the titles “Toot Sweet” (an instrumental) and “It’s Really Love” (with lyrics).
Anka offered Carson the opportunity to write new lyrics for “his” version of the song, in order for Carson to share songwriting credit (and royalties) for it. Both men earned an estimated $200,000 a year in royalties for the song during Carson’s tenure on The Tonight Show.
Back to Kenobi_65
Alexander Courage wrote the theme music for Star Trek: The Original Series and Gene Roddenberry wrote the lyrics. “What?” you say? “It’s an instrumental!”
Roddenberry wrote the lyrics without Courage’s permission so that he could take half of the royalties.
Link to Bullitt - What Roddenberry did was bad.
I’ve heard the lyrics sung to the music exactly once - on the Dr. Demento Show by the Doctor himself.
‘Dr. Demento’ is the persona created by DJ Barry Hansen, which he originated in 1970. Specializing in playing novelty or unusual recordings, the show went into national syndication in 1974, which lasted until 2010. A weekly show is still broadcast online.
The show is credited with discovering “Weird Al” Yankovic, among others.
The show is credited with discovering “Weird Al” Yankovic, among others.
Are you sure you don’t mean blamed?
In play:
Weird Al’s actual name is Alfred Matthew Yankovic. He is not related to Frankie Yankovic, the accordion-playing Polka King, although the two were friends until Frankie’s death in 1998.
He gave himself the “Weird Al” nickname while doing shifts as a DJ at radio station KCPR, the campus radio station at Cal Poly, because of his penchant for playing music that was, well, kind of weird (think of artists like Spike Jones, Stan Freberg, Tom Lehrer, Allan Sherman, Shel Silverstein, Frank Zappa)… and it just kind of stuck.
Frank Zappa (1940-1993) was born in Baltimore. He suffered a variety of illnesses as a child, including asthma, earaches, and sinus problems. A doctor attempted to treat his sinusitis by inserting a pellet of radium in each nostril.
Perhaps coincidentally (or not), various references to the nose appear in his cover art and song lyrics. In Drafted Again, Zappa sang “Leave my nose alone, please…” And an unreleased 1970 song was entitled A Snail in My Nose.
Musician Frank Zappa was an extremely prolific recording artist, releasing 62 albums during his lifetime. Although many of Zappa’s albums charted on the U.S. charts, he only had one single which reached the top 40 in the U.S.: “Valley Girl,” his 1982 collaboration with his then-teenaged daughter, Moon, which reached #32 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
The 1983 movie Valley Girl failed to garner any 1984 Oscar nominations. Terms of Endearment won the Oscar for Best Picture; Jack Nicholson and Shirley Maclaine won Best Actor and Best Actress for their roles in that movie, while John Lithgow and Debra Winger were also nominated for those awards for their performances in the same movie.
Only one man named Oscar has ever won an Oscar. This person was renowned lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960), and he did it twice.
His first win came in 1942 for Best Original Song ("The Last Time I Saw Paris", co-written with James Kern for the movie Lady Be Good).
Four years later, in 1946, he completed his set of book-ends when he partnered with Richard Rodgers to take home his second statuette in the same category with "It Might As Well Be Spring" from the movie State Fair.
Although the modern gender-neutral trend has been to refer to all those who act, regardless of sex, as “actors,” the Academy Awards, or Oscars, still maintain separate categories for Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress. As consolidating the categories would mean half as many people could win each year, and as some believe there are still important substantive differences between the acting of men and women, it seems likely that the distinction will remain.
Thirteen people have won Academy Awards for both Best Actor/Actress, and Best Supporting Actor/Actress.
The six men who have won both the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor Awards are Jack Lemmon, Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, Kevin Spacey, and Denzel Washington. The seven women who have won both the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress Awards are Helen Hayes, Ingrid Bergman, Maggie Smith, Meryl Streep, Jessica Lange, Cate Blanchett, and Renee Zellweger.
Jeanne Eagels became the first posthumous Academy Award nominee at the second Academy Awards when nominated for Best Actress after dying, possibly from delirium tremens.
The Rev. Jeanne Leinbach is the first female rector, or top priest, of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, in the Diocese of Ohio. The parish was founded in Cleveland in 1846 and is celebrating its 175th anniversary this year.