Jehtro Tull’s “Crest of a Knave” received the first Grammy Award ever given for Best Hard Rock/Heavy Metal Album. to the horror of Metallica, Guns ‘n’ Roses and Jane’s Addiction fans.
For the first time in Academy Award history, ten movies are in the running for Best Picture this year.
Ten movies were in the running for Best Picture in 1939, including Gone With The Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, and The Wizard of Oz (and there were ten nominees in other years, too – the field was cut from ten to five in 1944)
too late
Ah, thanks. I’d read that it was the first time ever. Ignorance fought.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington includes probably the best-known Hollywood portrayal of a U.S. Senate filibuster. The movie was parodied on The Simpsons during a guest appearance by Mel Gibson, who remade it as a bloody action thriller.
The Italian name “Ferrari,” the Polish name “Kowalski,” the French name “LeFebvre” and the Irish name “Geoghan” all translate, essentially, as “Smith.”
Former major-league infielder and manager Jim LeFebvre also had a minor acting career. On an episode of the 1960s TV series Batman, he portrayed one of the Riddler’s henchmen.
In the early days of the band U2, David “the Edge” Evans’ mother served as the band’s business manager. At her son’s insistence, the rest of the band addressed her politely as “Mrs. Edge.”
In the U2 hit. “Pride in the Name of Love”, the lyrics mistakenly refer to the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King happening in “early morning.”
Luther Adler, who was transformed into Hitler by a genie in an epsiode of “the Twilight Zone,” was Zero Mostel’s first replacement as Tevye in the original Broadway run of “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Luther Adler’s sister Stella was a very famous acting teacher whose students included Marlon Brando, Robert DeNiro, Warren Beatty, Martin Sheen, and melanie griffith.
ETA:I originally said wife; looked it up to be sure- she was actually his sister. Changed.
Martin Sheen’s given name is Ramón Gerardo Antonio Estévez. A devout Roman Catholic, Sheen chose his professional name as tribute to Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, a theologian and Catholic educator of some prominence in the 1950s.
Vietnam has the second-highest concentration of Catholics – 8-10% of the population – in Asia after the Philippines.
Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu served as first lady for her husband’s bachelor brother, President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, was sometimes called “the Jackie Kennedy of Asia” in western papers due to her youth, beauty, elegance, and Roman Catholicism. Ironically her husband and his brother were assassinated the same month as Jackie Kennedy’s husband, after which she went into exile in Rome.
During the early days of the Vietnam war, those in favor of the war often pronounced the country’s name as “Veet-nam.” In Vietnamese, this meant “dead duck.”
Elizabeth Ann Bayley was a member of New York society. At age 19 she married a wealthy importer, William Seton. After he died she converted to Roman Catholicism and used her social connections to raise money to build schools. She was the first native-born American to be canonized by the Catholic church.
William Cushing was raised in upstate New York. Thrown out of the Naval Academy for pranks and for flunking Spanish, he begged to be reinstated as a junior officer when the Civil War broke out. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles granted his request, and Cushing went on to have a stellar career, displaying great heroism and having tremendous luck on several dangerous missions, including the against-all-odds successful sinking of the Confederate ironclad CSS Albemarle in 1864.
The Gideon vs. Wainwright decision required that all criminal defendants be provided with a lawyer, free of charge, if they could not afford one.
Jonathan “Jim” Wainwright was also nicknamed “Skinny”, even before spending three-and-a-half years in Japanese prison camps upon the surrender of Corregidor. Douglas MacArthur, who had been evacuated by PT convoy, stated from Australia that Wainwright should have held out longer.
Jimmy Webb’s song “MacArthur Park”, voted by Dave Barry’s readers as the worst song of all time, is best known for its imagery of a cake melting in the rain.