Brandon Cruz, who later became a punk rocker, starred as a child in the TV series “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father”, opposite Bill Bixby. He had a later cameo on Bixby’s series “The Incredible Hulk” as a young man who helps the Hulk land a 747 (using footage from Airport).
Miyoshi Umeki was the first person of Asian descent to win an Academy Award, for her role in Sayonara. She was also nominated for a Tony Award for Flower Drum Song and recorded several albums of jazz standards. Despite her win, Hollywood didn’t beckon, and, after appearing in the film of Flower Drum Song, she had trouble getting roles because Hollywood didn’t have many roles for Asians. Her best known role after those two films was that of Mrs. Livingston on TV’s The Courtship of Eddie’s Father
The famous Hollywood sign is a secret portal to the Greek mythological underworld in the 2010 fantasy-adventure movie Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief.
Persephone was queen of the Underworld in Greek mythology, having been abducted by her her double uncle (i.e. brother of both her parents) Hades and sentenced to remain a month in Hades for each pomegranate seed she ate during her captivity. Details of her story varied but in some her children Melinoe and Zagreus were the most inbred divine beings in Greek mythology, being the offspring of Persephone by her father/uncle Zeus, thus making them half-sister and cousin of their mother and children, grandchildren, and grandnephew/grandniece of their father.
Lonzo and Oscar, and later Guy Lombardo, recorded “I’m My Own Grandpa”, by Dwight Latham and Moe Jaffe, which tells the story of a man who married an older woman who already had a daughter, who later marries the man’s father. Being his wife’s daughter’s husband’s son makes him, in musical logic, his own grandfather.
Robert Heinlein riffed on the idea in his 1959 short story “-- All You Zombies --”, which adds a time machine and a sex change operation to make the narrator his own father and his own mother.
Orson Welles (Citizen Kane), Preston Sturges (The Great McGinty), Mel Brooks (The Producers), and Whit Stillman (Metropolitan) all won Oscars for the first film they ever directed – for best screenplay.
The Broadwy musical production of The Producers won a reccord breaking 12 Tony Awards.
The 2005 film The Producers, starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, set an entertainment-industry record of some kind by being a film which was based on a Broadway show, which was based on another film (the 1968 film with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder), which was about a Broadway show, which was fictional or else it would have been “turtles all the way down”.
The production of Mame in 1974 was an adaption of a 1966 Broadway musical, which was based upon a 1958 movie that was an adaption of a 1956 Broadway play (or the play itself), which was based upon a 1955 book by Patrick Dennis.
Richard M. Nixon, having gone into virtual political seclusion after having lost both his races for the Presidency in 1960 and for Governor of California in 1962, campaigned heavily for Republican candidates nationwide in the 1966 elections, making contacts and collecting chits for his successful second bid for the Presidency in 1968 as “the new Nixon.”
Minimalist composer John Adams is best known for his operas Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer (about a PLO hijacking of a cruise ship) and Doctor Atomic (about Robert Oppenheimer). His oepra *I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky *is about the aftermath of the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake.
Presidents John Adams and Thomnas Jefferson both died on July 4, 1826, which was the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independance.
The Fox crime drama “Bones” stars Emily Deschanel as forensic anthropologist and crime novelist Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brennan, who works at Washington’s “Jeffersonian Institute”. David “Angel” Boreanaz provides the beefcake.
Leonard “Bones” McCoy was played by Karl Urban in the recent rebooting of the franchise; Urban previously played both Julius Caesar and Cupid in the TV series Xena and Hercules.
The actor with perhaps the most perfect name ever for a role, Adolph Caesar, was nominated for a Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as the drill sergeant of an all-black Army regiment in WW2 in Norman Jewison’s 1984 murder mystery A Soldier’s Story. The film was also Denzel Washington’s breakout vehicle.
Caesar previously had been best known for his trailer voiceovers for blaxploitation epics.
*Black Caesar, *which featured Fred Williamson and Gloria Hendry, was a remake of the classic gangster film Little Caesar. The 1973 version featured a musical score by James Brown.
Fred Vinson was appointed Chief Justice of the United States by President Harry S. Truman, and was a regular poker partner of the President’s.
In 1996, Northeast Missouri State University changed its name to Truman State to both honor Harry and attempt to shed its image as strictly a regional school.
Harry S Truman is the only president since Grover Cleveland not to have earned a college degree.
H.L. Menken, when attacking Warren G. Harding for his verbal abuse of the English language, referred to him as “Dr. Harding,” as a reference to the various honorary degrees he had picked up solely by virtue of being president.