On This Day

RichardTheBruce

February 15th

1951: Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg (Jane Seymour) is born--Hayes, Hayes and Harlington, Middlesex, England.
2017: Dynamite Entertainment releases Hammerhead #5 (of 6).

2020: The BOND 25 production announces a delay to release from 14 February to 8 April 2020.

Thunderfinger

Jane Seymour trivia: The Cure recorded the album Wild Mood Swings in her manor in the 90s.

RichardTheBruce

February 16th

1941: Commander Ian Fleming uses a courier's passport for travel to Gibraltar to establish a secure cipher link--from London to the Goldeneye liaison office. Plus he sets up a backup office in Tangier.
1965: BOND 4 filming begins in Paris, France, following agreement between partners Broccoli and Saltzman plus Kevin McClory to jointly produce the Fleming novel Thunderball. McClory accepts a 10 year moratorium.
1976: ABC broadcasts an edited version of On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/articles/ohmss_abc_tv.php3

RichardTheBruce

February 17th

1910: Marc Lawrence is born--New York City, New York.
(He dies 27 November 2005 at age 95--Palm Springs, California.)
1950: Valerie Leon is born--London, England.
1950: Prunella Gee is born--London, England.
1952: Ian Fleming begins writing his first Bond novel at Goldeneye--Casino Royale.
1962: Fleming makes another visit to the set, this time to filming at Falmouth with OO7 and Honey Ryder dodging bullets behind the sand dune. (Re-filmed due shots affected by US sailors investigating noise, gunfire.)
1971: Denise Richards is born--Downers Grove, Illinois.
1976: Rory Kinnear is born--Hatfield, Hertfordshire, England.
2004: Electronic Arts publishes its Everything or Nothing third-person shooter video game (developed by EA Redwood Shores) for PlayStation 2, Xbox, Nintendo GameCube. Represents Pierce Brosnan's final OO7 appearance. With Heidi Klum. Willem Defoe, even. Richard Kiel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bond_007:_Everything_or_Nothing

2015: BOND 24 finishes 9 days of filming at Sölden, Austria.

RichardTheBruce

February 18th

1929: Leonard Cyril Deighton is born--Marylebone, England.
1975: James Bond comic strip The Phoenix Project ends its run in The Daily Express.
(Started 23 September 1974. 2656–2780) Yaroslav Horak, artist. Jim Lawrence, writer.

https://www.popoptiq.com/double-oh-comics-008-the-phoenix-project/




https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/tpp.php3




https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/semic_1976.php3


https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/semic_1982.php3

2002: BOND 20 films Michael G. Wilson's cameo as General Chandler.
2016: An auction at Christie's sells items from Spectre for charity.

christies.com/james-bond-spectre-the-26480.aspx?saletitle=

To celebrate the release of Spectre on digital HD Blu-ray and DVD, Christie’s and EON Productions, Metro Goldwyn Mayer and Twentieth Century Fox present a unique opportunity to acquire memorabilia from the 24th film in the James Bond series. Highlights include an Aston Martin DB10 with a plaque signed by Daniel Craig (the only DB10 ever to be offered for sale to the public), a prototype Omega Seamaster 300 watch worn by Daniel Craig as James Bond and other spectacular props from the film.

All proceeds from the auctions will benefit Médecins Sans Frontières and number of other charitable institutions.

Day of the Dead Costume. Price realised GBP 98,500
Spectre Aston Martin DB10. Price realised GBP 2,434,500

RichardTheBruce

February 19th

1965: Goldfinger released in France.

French Lobby Cards

1967: Benicio Del Toro is born--San Germán, Puerto Rico.
1975: Bond comic The Black Ruby Caper begins its run in The Daily Express.
(Ends 15 July 1975. 2781–2897) Yaroslav Horak, artist. Jim Lawrence, writer.

https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/tbrc.php3





https://www.popoptiq.com/double-oh-comics-009-black-ruby-caper/




Danish http://www.bond-o-rama.dk/en/jb007-dk-no41-1977/





Tamil

1986: Adolfo Celi dies at age 63--Siena, Tuscany, Italy. (Born 27 July 1922--Messina, Sicily, Italy.)
1987: Albert R. Broccoli receives an honorary Order of the British Empire (OBE).
2015: BOND 24 films the funeral scene in Rome, Italy.

RichardTheBruce

February 20th

1964: El satánico Dr. No (The Satanic Dr. No) released in Mexico.

1964: From Russia With Love released in Norway.

1959 Paperback

2002: Casino Royale 1967 re-released in France.
2013: Activision turns away from publishing licensed games.
2018: Russian premiere of ‘Casino Royale’ in Concert, Russian Philharmonic Orchestra, presented by Zapomni, Crocus City Hall, Krasnogorsky District, Moscow Oblas.

Продюсерская компания Zapomni представляет российскую премьеру киноконцерта «Джеймс Бонд: Казино Рояль», который пройдет только один раз, в Москве, 20 февраля 2018 года в Crocus City Hall.

RichardTheBruce

February 21st

1943: The Norwegian tanker Stigstad is attacked and sunk by torpedoes from several U-boats.

British Merchant Navy survivors on a life raft include young radio operator Kevin McClory. They last two weeks and cross 600 miles at sea to be rescued off the coast of Ireland. Three men die from the event. McClory suffers from frostbite and is unable to speak for over a year, eventually recovering with a stutter and continuing service in the British Navy.

1943: Multiple German U-boats attack the Norwegian tanker Stigstad, sinking it with a torpedo.

Survivors on a life raft, including Kevin McClory, endure two weeks across 600 miles until they make the coast of Ireland. Two die at sea, one dies later. McClory suffers frostbite and is unable to speak for over a year after the incident. He returns to the Navy and serves till war's end.

Aboard Stigstad when hit on 21 Feb 1943
https://uboat.net/allies/merchants/crews/ship2663.html

More detail on the vessel and crew
https://www.warsailors.com/singleships/stigstad.html

1962: Location filming in Jamaica ends and the production team departs for England and the fantastic sets Ken Adam constructed for Dr. No's base, the ventilation gauntlet, and MI6 interiors. A few planned shots delayed for weather would be made up later.
2012: The second official BOND 23 photo released shows Judi Dench, director Sam Mendes and director of photography Roger Deakins in the MI6 bunker.

2013: The Institution of Mechanical Engineers celebrates Wing Commander Ken Wallis, creator of ‘Little Nellie’.

events.imeche.org/ViewEvent?code=l306

2015: BOND 24 films car scenes with Daniel Craig in the vicinity of the Colosseum, Rome, Italy.

2015: Taryn Simon's exhibition Simon’s Birds of the West Indies begins at the Almine Rech Gallery, Paris, France.

TARYN SIMON | Birds of The West Indies
https://artmap.com/alminerech/exhibition/taryn-simon-2015?print=do


21 February – 14 March 2015

Parallel to Taryn Simon’s exhibition at Jeu de Paume, the American artist’s first monographic exhibition at a French institution, Almine Rech Gallery is pleased to present in its Paris space the European premiere of Simon’s Birds of the West Indies, from February 21st until March 14th, 2015.

In 1936, an American ornithologist named James Bond published the definitive taxonomy Birds of the West Indies. Ian Fleming, an active bird-watcher living in Jamaica, appropriated the name for his novel’s lead character. He found it “flat and colourless,” a fitting choice for a character intended to be “anonymous. . . a blunt instrument in the hands of the government.” This co-opting of a name was the first in a series of substitutions and replacements that would become central to the construction of the Bond narrative.

Conflating Bond the ornithologist with 007, Taryn Simon uses the title and format of the ornithologist’s taxonomy for her work Birds of the West Indies (2013–2014). In Birds of the West Indies, 2014, Simon casts herself as James Bond (1900–1989) the ornithologist, and identifies, photographs, and classifies all the birds that appear within the twenty-four films of the James Bond franchise. The appearance of many of the birds was unplanned and virtually undetected, operating as background noise for whatever set they happened to fly into. Simon ventured through every scene to discover those moments of chance. The result is a taxonomy not unlike the original Birds of the West Indies. The artist has trained her eye away from the agents of seduction—glamour, luxury, power, violence, sex—to look only in the margins. She forces the viewer’s gaze off center, against the intentions of the franchise, by focusing on the forgotten, insignificant, and overlooked.

Each bird is classified by the time code of its appearance, its location, and the year in which it flew. The taxonomy is organized by country: some locations correspond to nations we acknowledge on our maps, including Switzerland, Afghanistan, and North Korea, while others exist solely in the fictionalized rendering of James Bond’s missions, including Republic of Isthmus, San Monique, and SPECTRE Island.

Simon’s ornithological discoveries occupy a liminal space—confined within the fiction of the James Bond universe and yet wholly separate from it. The birds flew freely in the background of the background, unnoticed or unrecognized until they were catalogued by Simon. Sometimes indecipherable specks hovering in the sky or perched on a building, these birds will never know, nor care, about their fame. In their new static form, the birds often resemble dust on a negative, a once common imperfection that has disappeared in the age of Photoshop. Other times, they are frozen in compositions reminiscent of genres from photographic history. Some appear as perfected and constructed still lifes while others have a snapshot quality. Many appear in an obscured, low-resolution form, as if they had been photographed by surveillance drones or hidden cameras. These visual variations are also affected by feature film’s evolution from 35 mm to high-resolution digital output.

Simon’s taxonomy of 331 birds is a precise consideration of a new nature found in an alternate reality. Bird study skins, correspondence, awards, and personal effects of James Bond the ornithologist have been collected by Simon and are displayed in vitrines alongside the photographic works. These artifacts present remnants of the real-life James Bond in his parallel existence to the fictional spy who took his name.

The James Bond film franchise relies upon an ageless, Western male hero with an inexhaustible supply of state-of-the-art weaponry, luxury vehicles, and desirable women. This illusion requires a constant process of replacements. A contract exists between the franchise and the viewer that binds both to a set of expectations. In servicing the desires of the consumer, fantasy becomes formula, and repetition is required; viewers demand something new, but only if it remains essentially the same

Taryn Simon’s film Honey Ryder (Nikki van der Zyl), 1962 documents the most prolific agent of substitution in the Bond franchise. From 1962 to 1979, Nikki van der Zyl, an unseen and uncredited performer, provided voice dubs for over a dozen major and minor characters throughout nine Bond films. Invisible until now, van der Zyl further underscores the interplay of substitution and repetition in the preservation of myth and the construction of fantasy.

Simon’s works have been the subject of monographic exhibitions at Folkwang Museum, Essen, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2013-2014), MoMA, New York (2012), Tate Modern, London (2011), Neue National Galerie, Berlin (2011), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007), Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2008), Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2004), PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2003). Simon is a graduate of Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island) and a Guggenheim Fellow. Several books have been published providing an inventory of her works accompanied by critical texts, including essays by Salman Rushdie, Homi K. Bhabha, and Hans Ulrich Obrist.
www.galeriealminerech.com

2018: Dynamite Entertainment's James Bond The Body #2 Part Two - The Brain comes available for purchase.

Description: James Bond leads the interrogation of a scientist who allowed a lethal virus to be stolen. But when the investigation takes a surprising turn, Bond begins to question whether he is enough.

RichardTheBruce

February 22nd

1938: Kätherose Derr (Karin Dor) is born--Wiesbaden, Hesse, Germany.
(She dies 6 November 2017 at age 79--Munich, Bavaria, Germany.)

Karin Dor obituary
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/nov/15/karin-dor-obituary
Actor best known as a Bond girl in You Only Live Twice
Ronald Bergan | Wed 15 Nov 2017 06.43 EST | Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 15.07 EST


Karin Dor as the seductive Spectre operative Helga Brandt, with Sean Connery as 007,
in You Only Live Twice, 1967. Photograph: Allstar/United Artists

No matter what roles she played in films, on stage or on television throughout the rest of her career, the German actor Karin Dor, who has died aged 79, was labelled a Bond girl. Her induction as a member of this exclusive group of beautiful women who have provided James Bond with a love interest came in You Only Live Twice (1967), in which she met a memorably grisly end.

Dor played the seductive, titian-haired Helga Brandt, an operative of the criminal organisation Spectre ordered to kill 007 (Sean Connery), who has been conveniently tied up for her. “I’ve got you now,” she states ambivalently. “Well, enjoy yourself!” he replies. She slaps his face and threatens him with a surgical knife, which he wrestles from her, using it to cut the strap on her black dress.

Helga expertly switches from being cold and calculating to passionately kissing Connery. She seems to have changed sides, though she makes a further attempt to kill Bond by trapping him in a booby-trapped plane, which she parachutes out of, before it crashes. When the super-villain Spectre boss Blofeld (Donald Pleasence) discovers that Bond has survived the crash, he activates a mechanism that dumps Helga into a tank filled with piranha fish, which eat her alive.

Karin Dor with Alfred Hitchcock during the filming of the 1969 film Topaz.
Photograph: Allstar/Universal

Dor also fails to survive to the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz (1969). A rare bright spot in one of Hitchcock’s most anonymous films, she is Juanita de Cordoba, a dark-haired anti-Castro resistant, her German accent notwithstanding, known as the widow of a “hero of the revolution”, a description that enables her to work undercover. When her activities are discovered, she is shot by her revolutionary lover, providing the film with its best visual sequence. As Juanita collapses onto a marble floor, her deep purple dress spreads beneath her like a pool of blood.

Surprisingly, these high-profile roles in two English language commercial successes did not help Dor to achieve further international recognition. However, she was hugely popular in Germany and Austria throughout the 1960s, mainly in escapist action movies loosely based on the thrillers of Edgar Wallace (called Krimis from the German Kriminalfilm), and the western adventures of Karl May, co-starring the dubbed ex-Tarzan Lex Barker, almost all of them directed by her first husband, Harald Reinl.

Born Kätherose Derr in Wiesbaden, she studied acting and ballet at school and began in films as an extra. Her marriage at 18 to the Austrian director Reinl, 30 years her senior, gave her the chance to appear as a juvenile lead in numerous period melodramas and operettas such as The White Horse Inn (1960).

Apart from the Wallace and May series, Dor was a favourite fräulein in distress in several horror movies with Barker as the hero, including The Invisible Doctor Mabuse (1962), The Face of Fu Manchu (1965) and The Torture Chamber of Doctor Sadism (1967), the last two starring Christopher Lee as an evil mastermind.

In contrast to the range of the low-budget Krimis, horror spin-offs and German westerns, Dor starred as Brunhild in Reinl’s The Nibelungen, shown in two parts, Siegfried (1966) and Kriemhild’s Revenge (1967), an epic that required the use of 8,000 extras in one battle scene alone.

Dor took fewer and fewer film roles from the 70s onwards, although she did appear regularly in series on German television.

Her third husband, the stuntman George Robotham, died in 2007. Dor is survived by a son, the actor Andreas Renell, from her marriage to Reinl, which ended in divorce, as did her second marriage.

• Karin Dor (Kätherose Derr), actor, born 22 February 1938; died 6 November 2017

1968: Casino Royale released in Colombia.
2012: Omega celebrates 50 Years of Bond.

Magazine | Classic Life
The Man With The Golden Jubilee: Omega celebrates 50 years of James Bond
https://www.classicdriver.com/en/article/classic-life/man-golden-jubilee-omega-celebrates-50-years-james-bond
22 February 2012

The new Omega boutique at London’s Olympic Stadium has been temporarily transformed into the secret headquarters of MI6. For the presentation of its ‘Seamaster 300 M Bond Edition’ chronometer, Omega was able to exhibit many of Q’s original props, previously unseen by the general public.

Together with Bond movie costume designer Lindy Hemming, Omega President Stephen Urquhart officially presented the Omega Seamaster 300 M Bond Edition anniversary watch.

The Oscar-winning Hemming had first placed an Omega Seamaster on Pierce Brosnan’s wrist for the 1995 film ‘Goldeneye’. Speaking today, 22 February, she commented: “For me, James Bond is a ‘blue’ type. He holds the rank of Commander in the Royal Navy, wearing the service’s traditional dark blue uniform. Thus, ‘blue’ really is the colour of the world’s most famous secret agent.”

https://www.classicdriver.com/sites/default/files/styles/colorbox/public/import/articlesv2/images/_de/7298/JamesBond_Omega_Watch_02pop.jpg?itok=oQdqg2HJ

https://www.classicdriver.com/sites/default/files/styles/colorbox/public/import/articlesv2/images/_de/7298/JamesBond_Omega_Watch_03pop.jpg?itok=TMp8ArzQ

For this reason, the agent’s watch in that film had a blue dial and, since Goldeneye, 007 has worn an Omega.

During the presentation of the limited-edition (to 11,007 pieces) watch, selected ‘007’ props were on display, including a gold bar from ‘Goldfinger’, and Bond’s space helmet from ‘Moonraker’.


Photos: Classic Driver

2017: Dynamite Entertainment's James Bond Vol. 2 Eidolon is released.

Description: James Bond is trapped in Los Angeles with a MI6 agent under fire and a foreign intelligence service trying to put them both in bags... and possibly more than one foreign intelligence service. And things may not be any safer in Britain, with bodies dropping and ghosts moving in the political mist...
https://www.comixology.eu/James-Bond-2015-2016-Vol-2-Eidolon/digital-comic/467983

RichardTheBruce

February 23rd

1947: Shakira Baksh (later Caine) is born--British Guiana.

1964: Ian Fleming is photographed on a beach near his Goldeneye estate.

1965: John Kitzmiller dies at age 51--Rome, Lazio, Italy. (Born 4 December 1913--Battle Creek, Michigan.)

The Wild Eye
Keeping a wild eye on European Cinema of the past and present
John Kitzmiller
http://www.thewildeye.co.uk/blog/performers-directors/black-actors-in-italy/john-kitzmiller/
November 25, 2010 Matt Blake Americans in Cinecitta, Black Actors in Italy 7

John Kitzmiller was one of the most prominent Afro-American actors to work in Italy during the post war period. Born in Michigan in 1913, he first came to Europe as a soldier during the liberation of Italy, winning a Victory Medal for his efforts. He fell in love with the country, deciding to stay there rather than head home once the conflict was over, and soon drifted into acting, starting his career playing a stock selection of GIs and American expats. In 1948 he had a career defining role in Alberto Lattuada’s Senza pietà, as a GI who becomes friendly with an Italian girl (played by Carla Del Poggio). As well as bringing his face to the international arthouse crowd, this was a popular film on the US university circuit, where it gained a considerable following among Afro-American students.


John Kitzmiller in Dr. No

More roles followed, although with the decline of neo-realism and the growing emphasis on using professional actors they shrunk in size. He was a trumpet player in Luci del varietà (directed by Lattuada and a young Federico Fellini), played a valet in Marino Girolami’s Canto per te (a vehicle for the famed tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano), and appeared as a selection of servants, criminals or workmen. With the resurgence of the swashbuckler and peplum in the 1950s his workrate stepped up a notch, and by the early 60s he was appearing in three or four films a year.

It was at this time that he won a further degree of international success, starring as Quarrel in the hugely succesful Dr No, where his role – most of which was shot in Jamaica – was more prominent than his lowly billing would suggest. This led to one final key role, as the titular character in Géza von Radványi’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was released in the same year as his death in 1965 from cirrhosis of the liver (caused, reputedly, by his long term alcoholism).

Kitzmiller’s importance wasn’t so much for the films he appeared in – although he certainly appeared in some important films. It was in the fact that he was a trailblazer for black actors both in Italy and in the US, at a time in which cinema was an almost entirely caucasian occupation. Given that, it’s surprising how little biographical information is available about him.

About Matt Blake
The WildEye is a blog dedicated to the wild world of Italian cinema (and, ok, sometimes I digress into discussing films from other countries as well). Peplums, comedies, dramas, spaghetti westerns... they're all covered here.

5 Comments

Tom B. | July 22, 2009 at 3:35 pm

Thanks Matt. I agree he was trailblazer in opening up roles for blacks in Italian cinema. Any fan of Italian films has heard of his name, but as you say so little biographical information is available. Thanks for posting on this unique actor in European films.

mattblake | July 23, 2009 at 1:20 pm

A little bit more info on Mr. Kitzmiller. In a book on Fellini (Federico Fellini: his life and work by Tullio Kezich, Minna Proctor, Viviana Mazza), he’s described as: “a former chemical engineer who’d slipped accidentally into movie acting”

mattblake | July 23, 2009 at 1:26 pm

And a bit more, an obituary from a magazine called Jet, March 11th 1965.

John Kitzmiller, who became and Italian star, dies at 51.

A husky American negro who became one of Italy’s most celebrated movie actors but never played in a film produced in his native land, John Kitzmiller, 51, died in Rome after a career that spanned 20 years. Kitzmiller, of Battle Creek, Mich., and a former captain of the Engineers with the famed Negro 92nd Division of World War 2, succumbed to a liver ailment just two months after he was wed to attractive, blond Dusia Bejic, a Yugoslav in Belgrade. Kitzmiller went overseas with the division in the dark days of WW2, but he never forgot his ambition to become an actor. After the war, he decided not to go home but settled in Italy, where he made his first film, To Live in Peace. He received rave notices. There followed a string of ten movies with good roles for Kitzmiller, establishing him, along with cinema-lovely Gina Lollobrigida, as the top motion star in the 1950s in Italy, where realism and authenticity in film making are the sought after ingredients, not the colour of an actor’s skin

And, from From Sambo to Superspade by Daniel J. Leab

John Kitzmiller became an actor while on occupation duty in Italy in 1946. He was playing poker in a sidewalk cafe when he was spotted by two Italians who thought him physically perfect for a war movie they were casting

...

mattblake | November 25, 2010 at 4:41 pm

And here’s another newspaper article mentioning his marriage:

John Kitzmiller's wedding article from Jet


Luciano Benetti was a little known Italian actor who turned up in a handful of cape and sword films

2012: Press release announces Skyfall November IMAX screenings.
2015: BOND 24 night filming continues in Rome, Italy.
2018: Lewis Gilbert dies at age 97--Monaco. (Born 6 March 1920--London, England.)

Lewis Gilbert obituary
https://theguardian.com/film/2018/feb/27/lewis-gilbert-obituary
Film director whose long and varied career produced hits including Alfie and Educating Rita
Sheila Whitaker
Tue 27 Feb 2018 13.05 EST

Julie Walters and Michael Caine in a scene from Educating Rita, 1983, directed by Lewis Gilbert. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

The film director Lewis Gilbert, who has died aged 97, never sought the limelight: he always said he wanted his films to speak for him, and several of them, including Alfie (1966) and Educating Rita (1983), have become part of cinema history.

Alfie is the story of an amoral young man who philosophises to camera on sex, love and women as he pursues sexual encounters with one girl after another. Paramount wanted the setting moved to New York and Tony Curtis to play Alfie, but Gilbert held out for Michael Caine. Caine’s performance assured his career, and the film was nominated for five Oscars.

Alfie’s success brought Gilbert his first Bond film, You Only Live Twice (1967), to be followed a decade later by The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and in 1979 by Moonraker. Lewis wryly commented that in earlier years he used to make a feature film for less than the Moonraker telephone bill.

It was Gilbert’s wife, Hylda, who brought Educating Rita to his attention and, having resisted studio pressure, this time again to move the setting to the US and to cast Dolly Parton as Rita, he finally raised the finance, despite not having any distribution deals in place, and cast Julie Walters and Caine. The film received three Oscar nominations and Hollywood studios vied to distribute it. He followed this with Shirley Valentine in 1989 with Pauline Collins as a housewife striking out for freedom in Greece.

Gilbert was what he described as an unfashionable director and considered this to have been why he survived for so long in the film industry. “I’ve never been known for any one kind of film. So, I’m really somebody like a doctor who you call in when you want the patient to live, as it were.”

Lewis Gilbert described himself as an unfashionable director. Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian

Born in London into a vaudeville family, Gilbert began touring in an act, the Four Kemptons, with his parents when he was four. His love of theatre and film began there – he watched films, shown as part of the vaudeville programmes, from behind the screen. He went to a theatrical school when he was 12 and he also entered cinema as an actor, appearing in quota quickies, including The Price of a Song (1935) directed by Michael Powell, and Over the Moon (1939).

It was while he was appearing with Laurence Olivier in The Divorce of Lady X (1938) that Alexander Korda, the producer, offered to send him to Rada. Gilbert replied that he would rather direct and so was sent to Korda’s Denham studios in Buckinghamshire as a third assistant director. He graduated up the scale, working with Alfred Hitchcock on Jamaica Inn (1939) – “He was the man I learned the most from” – and with a variety of studios, eventually becoming a first assistant.

At the beginning of the second world war, Gilbert volunteered for the RAF and from there he went to the US Army Air Forces film unit, where he worked on documentaries with Hollywood veterans such as William Wyler, Frank Capra and William Keighley. This gave Gilbert his directing break, as Keighley, hating the British winter cold, preferred his Mayfair hotel to going out filming. During this time he met Arthur Elton, and on being invalided out in 1944 took up his offer of a job at Gaumont-British Instructional directing documentaries.

His first feature, The Little Ballerina (1947), a children’s film with Margot Fonteyn, was successful to the point where, after its Saturday morning children’s run, it was put out on a circuit release. His first major success was Emergency Call (1952, known in the US as The Hundred Hour Hunt), in which Jack Warner has a race against time to find three people with the right blood type to save a child’s life.

He co-wrote the film with Vernon Harris, who became a collaborator for more than 40 years. Gilbert followed this with Cosh Boy (1953, also known as The Slasher), featuring Joan Collins, an X film which was widely banned – “Today, you’d show it to 10-year-olds” – and Johnny on the Run (1953), the first film which he also produced.

Gilbert’s long and varied career included thrillers and a number of war movies – “The war was the single biggest influence in my life, a very traumatic time. I think it was natural in the years after the war had ended to make films that were part propaganda and part portraits of heroism.” These included Albert RN (1953), which the producers had originally wanted shot in 3D, The Sea Shall Not Have Them (1954) and Reach for the Sky (1955), Gilbert’s personal favourite, in which Kenneth More played the war hero Douglas Bader.

Michael Caine in a scene from Alfie, 1966;
Gilbert resisted the studio’s idea of casting Tony Curtis in the role.
Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Paramount

Then followed Carve Her Name With Pride (1958) the true story of the secret agent Violette Szabo, Sink the Bismarck! (1960), HMS Defiant (1962) and Operation: Daybreak (1975). This last Gilbert felt could never be commercial because “it was very realistic and very downbeat but it was a true picture, whilst the earlier films may almost have glamorised wartime”.

In 1959 he had an unhappy experience working with Orson Welles on Ferry to Hong Kong. Gilbert had wanted Peter Finch to play the tramp and Curt Jurgens to play the officer. Instead he got Welles as the captain. Aside from the poor script, Gilbert said, Welles hated Jurgens and every scene that involved both of them had to be shot separately. The film and the overall strategy failed.

The Greengage Summer (1961, also known as Loss of Innocence), starring More (the producers had wanted Richard Burton, but he decided on Alexander the Great instead), was a happier affair, although, during the shooting, a blight on greengage trees forced them to buy in supplies of the fruit from Harrods and stick them on to the trees.

He continued working well into his 80s, and directed Walters again on his last feature film, Before You Go (2002). Always highly professional in his work, Gilbert was also a charming, unaffected and kind man with a friendly welcome for everyone. He and Hylda loved attending festivals (especially the annual festival in Cannes, where they had a flat) and going to screenings to look at the widest possible range of new films from directors of all ages and, most importantly, happily discussing them afterwards.

In 1990, he was awarded the Michael Balcon lifetime achievement award from Bafta, and he was appointed CBE in 1997. In 2010, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, Bafta held an evening of celebration at which he was interviewed on stage by Walters. He published his autobiography, All My Flashbacks, and appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in the same year.

Hylda (nee Tafler), whom he married in 1951, died in 2005. They had two sons, John and Stephen.

• Lewis Gilbert, film director, producer and writer, born 6 March 1920; died 23 February 2018

RichardTheBruce

February 24th

1932: Michel Jean Legrand is born--Paris, France.
(He dies 26 January 2019--American Hospital of Paris, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.)

Michel Legrand obituary
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jan/27/michel-legrand-obituary
French composer, jazz musician and conductor who wrote the
scores for more than 250 films including
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Yentl
John Fordham | Sun 27 Jan 2019 11.16 EST


Michel Legrand in 1975. Photograph: Michael Putland/Getty Images

The music of the composer, singer, arranger, conductor, jazz musician and producer Michel Legrand went on glowing long after many of the 250-odd films he had written soundtracks for had fallen by the wayside.

Legrand, who has died aged 86, made deadpan reference to that phenomenon when he played at Ronnie Scott’s club in London in 2011 – announcing that it was his ambition to meet “one of the 19 people who ever saw The Happy Ending”, the 1969 Hollywood film for which he wrote his classic love song What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?

But if some of the film vehicles for Legrand’s artistry were outlasted by his music, several became famous, including The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), with Noel Harrison singing The Windmills of Your Mind, which won Legrand’s first Oscar, for best film theme song, in 1969. Another Oscar followed for The Summer of ’42 two years later – this time for best film music. Its theme, The Summer Knows, was recorded later that year by Barbra Streisand, whose 1983 film, Yentl, won him his third Oscar, again for best music.


The famous Legrand Jazz album.
Photograph: Sabine Weiss/Columbia Records

Legrand’s songwriting skills flowered in the early 1950s through intimate acquaintance with the modern chanson movement in Paris, at first as a gifted piano accompanist. After the second world war, the US was nostalgic for French culture, and when Columbia Records commissioned an English-language album of chanson classics, the young Legrand was hired to steer it – and found himself with an 8m-selling hit.

By his mid-20s, Legrand was able to call the shots as a composer and arranger on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1958, he even had more than sufficient clout to hire Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Bill Evans – three of the hippest and most acclaimed young jazz musicians of the decade – to play sidemen’s roles on his Legrand Jazz session.

Michel was born in the Paris suburb of Bécon-les-Bruyères into a family with strong musical connections. His father, Raymond Legrand, was a composer, conductor and former pupil of Gabriel Fauré, and in his later years would go on to collaborate with Edith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier. His maternal uncle on his mother Marcelle’s side was the dance-band saxophonist and bandleader Jacques Hélian.

But Raymond left home when Michel was three, and his mother Marcelle (nee Ter-Mikaëlian), struggled to provide for the boy and his older sister, Christiane. He found a consoling friend in the flat’s battered piano and it quickly emerged that he had a gift. Christiane also played the instrument, and she was similarly destined for a successful career in music, as a jazz singer.

Michel became obsessed with the music and life of Franz Schubert, and – with Nadia Boulanger among his teachers – won a raft of prizes on a variety of instruments at the Paris Conservatoire, which he began attending as a 10-year-old in 1942. But a 1947 Paris concert by the bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and his big band thrilled him with the sound of jazz.

By the time he left the conservatoire in 1949 he was a budding jazz pianist with a profound knowledge of musical theory and a working knowledge of many instruments. His resourcefulness quickly found him work with chanson stars including Juliette Gréco and Zizi Jeanmaire, and in 1954 the international popularity of chanson brought his international breakthrough.


Michel Legrand playing at the Royal Albert Hall, London, in the mid-1970s.
Photograph: David Redfern/Redferns

Columbia-EMI wanted an English-language version of those evocative Parisian songs, and none of the big-name American arrangers was interested. Through a contact at the record company, the unknown Legrand was commissioned to produce it – for $200 and no royalties. The result was the bestseling album I Love Paris,. Chevalier then hired Legrand as his musical director and the resulting US tours enhanced the newcomer’s stature.

Legrand began a solo career, with the easy-listening but sophisticated jazz albums Holiday in Rome (1955), Michel Legrand Plays Cole Porter (1957) and Legrand in Rio (1958). He also worked with the French Caribbean singer Henri Salvador, who, under the alias of Henri Cording, made some of the first French forays into rock’n’roll, with Legrand furnishing the music and the surrealist novelist, poet and jazz critic Boris Vian the lyrics. In 1958, he returned to New York to make his celebrated Legrand Jazz album – with Ben Webster joining Coltrane, Evans and Davis in the lineup.

Legrand later admitted to being anxious about Davis’s involvement. The trumpeter rarely played sessions other than his own and made a diva’s point of arriving 15 minutes late, checking out the music from the studio doorway and promptly leaving if he did not like the sound of it. But, according to Legrand, the usually taciturn Davis not only participated, but even asked the young bandleader if he had liked his contribution.

By this point, Legrand was developing a parallel career as a film composer. He scored Henri Verneuil’s 1955 crime passionel movie Les Amants du Tage (The Lovers of Lisbon), and became a significant collaborator with the new wave directors Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda and François Reichenbach. He also composed for Jacques Demy, most notably on the innovative Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) – a reappraisal of the film musical, combining a realist perspective with a narrative in which songs replaced dialogue.

The movie’s theme song Je Ne Pourrai Jamais Vivre Sans Toi was covered – in English as I Will Wait for You – by stars including Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Liza Minnelli. Legrand, Demy and the film’s lead, Catherine Deneuve, collaborated on the Hollywood homage Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort, 1967), with Gene Kelly. Legrand also wrote for Gilles Grangier and Yves Allégret, and for Joseph Losey – most notably in 1971 on the Palme d’Or winner The Go-Between.

Through close relationships with the jazz-enthusiastic chanson singer Claude Nougaro and the Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel, Legrand not only began to develop a personal repertoire of original songs, but to consider performing them himself. He collaborated on the lyrics with other writers including Eddy Marnay and Jean Dréjac, and worked on the occasional forays into songwriting by the novelist Françoise Sagan.

In 1968, Legrand moved to Los Angeles, during which time he composed the award-winning scores to The Thomas Crown Affair and then, two years later, Summer of ’42. Legrand later said that Jewison cut the highly charged seven-and-a-half-minute chess game scene between Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in The Thomas Crown Affair to fit the music, which begins with a solo harp and ends with a big band playing a jazz waltz.

As well as the Oscars, between 1971 and 1975 Legrand won five Grammy awards, and in this period was on his way to becoming one of the US’s most popular Frenchmen. A sharp and witty raconteur, he appeared on television chatshows, and for relaxation worked at Shelly’s Manne Hole club in Los Angeles with the great double bassist Ray Brown. In the next decade, he composed for Clint Eastwood and Orson Welles, for Streisand’s Yentl, and the James Bond film Never Say Never Again (1983).

During this time Legrand also played a lot of jazz, making three albums with a regular trio featuring the bassist Marc-Michel Le Bévillon and the drummer André Ceccarelli, and bringing together the celebrated American saxophonists Phil Woods and Zoot Sims to join him in a septet to make the 1982 album After the Rain. He released a solo vocal album, and staged his own oratorio, inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as part of the celebrations for the bicentenary of the French Revolution, in 1989.

Legrand’s search for new challenges found one that even he could not pull off when he directed the unsuccessful semi-autobiographical film Cinq Jours en Juin (1989), but leading a big band in the next decade found him on more secure ground – he toured widely, and accompanied Ray Charles, Diana Ross and Björk with it. Legrand composed for Jean Guidoni’s 1995 album Vertigo and participated in an award-winning show at the Casino de Paris with Guidoni the following year.

In 1997, with the playwright Didier Van Cauwelaert, he worked on Le Passe Muraille, a quirky musical adapted from a 1943 Marcel Aymé short story about an unassuming clerk who can walk through walls. The show went to Broadway as Amour five years later, and its lead singer Melissa Errico became an important muse for Legrand. They worked together for six years on the album Legrand Affair (2011).

In his later years, Legrand remained ready for surprises, even if the world was beginning to treat him as a grand old man. Stars queued up to perform his hits in a celebration at the Louvre in 2000; and the French government made him an officier de la Légion d’honneur in 2003.

When his friend Nougaro died in 2004, he recorded Legrand Nougaro, where the composer and a bespoke jazz band accompanied tapes of his friend’s voice in new performances of the Toulouse singer’s songs – including the previously unheard Mon Dernier Concert.

In 2009 Legrand came to Britain with a repertoire combining his biggest hits and a selection of jazz favourites, and a lineup including his longterm partner, the harpist Catherine Michel and the singer Alison Moyet. The following year, he conducted the Moscow Virtuosi chamber group in Russia, for the two-CD set The Music of Michel Legrand. And for his 80th birthday Christmas album the following year – Noël! Noël!! Noël!!! – Legrand was joined by Rufus Wainwright, Jamie Cullum and Iggy Pop.

“When I hit 80,” he said, “I knew that the last chapter of my work would be classical. So I wrote a piano concerto that I recorded myself, a cello concerto, a harp concerto, some sonatas. I wrote a huge ballet. I’m very proud of that. It’s a good final chapter.”

Last September, Legrand conducted orchestral arrangements of music from his soundtracks with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, against projections of the scenes they originally accompanied, at the Royal Festival Hall, in London.

He lived his last years as he had lived his earliest ones as a precocious music student in Paris – guided, as he said, by the “ambition … to live completely surrounded by music. My dream is not to miss out anything. That’s why I’ve never settled on one musical discipline. I love playing, conducting, singing and writing, and in all styles. So I turn my hand to everything – not just a bit of everything. Quite the opposite, I do all these activities at once, seriously, sincerely and with deep commitment.”

Legrand had three marriages. The first, to Christine Bouchard, a model, and second, to the actor and producer Isabelle Rondon, ended in divorce. In 2014, he married the actor Macha Méril.

He is survived by Macha and his four children, Dominique, Hervé, Benjamin and Eugénie.

• Michel Jean Legrand, composer and musician, born 24 February 1932; died 26 January 2019

1971: Tom Mankiewicz completes the Diamonds Are Forever first draft.
2012: The 85th Academy Awards sees performances from Dame Shirley Bassey ("Goldfinger") and Adele ("Skyfall"). Later in the proceedings "Skyfall" wins Best Song.

2017: Roger Becker dies at age 71.

The Chassis Guru Behind Lotus's Best Cars Has Died
https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/news/a32736/the-chassis-guru-behind-lotuss-best-cars-has-died/
Roger Becker spent 44 years at Lotus before retiring in 2010.
Feb 24, 2017 | By Travis Okulski


Lotus

During the filming of the classic Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, there was a problem: The stunt drivers couldn't get the Esprit to slide around and do what they wanted during the car chase. Roger Becker, the man who did the development driving and chassis tuning on the Esprit, was on hand during filming. He knew that the car could do what the script called for, but he also knew that the car wasn't being driven properly.

So he did it himself. And that's how Lotus's test and development driver became the Bond's stunt driver.

Sadly, Becker just passed away.

Becker worked at Lotus for 44 years and had a hand in developing basically every car the company built since 1966, when the original Elan was still in production. He worked on everything from the Esprit to the Elise and the Exige to the Evora. Becker's finger print was on basically every car the company made.

From 1988, Becker worked alongside his son, Matt (who left the company in 2014), developing cars for the English manufacturer. Together, they have a combined 70 years of experience at Lotus, which is actually longer than the company existed.

Roger Becker was 71.

Lotus Cars
about 2 years ago

We are saddened to hear of the passing of Roger Becker, formerly the Director of Vehicle Engineering at Group Lotus until his retirement in 2010.

Roger joined Lotus in 1966, working on the Elan assembly line at Cheshunt. His natural driving and engineering skills came to the attention of Lotus founder Colin Chapman and Roger was quickly moved to the vehicle development team where he worked on the Lotus Europa Twin Cam – his first Lotus car development project.

During his career at Lotus, Roger worked on the development of every Lotus car, including the Esprit, Excel, Elan, Elise, Exige S1 and S2 and the first generation Lotus Evora, helping to ensure that the essence and purity of Lotus was instilled in all Lotus cars over the years. He also worked with many of the world’s major automotive manufacturers in support of Lotus’ consultancy engineering business.

On his retirement from Lotus, following 44 years of service, a series of Lotus Elise and Lotus Exige sports cars in bespoke RGB Special Edition specification were produced. Roger, himself, owned an Elise version.

He will be remembered by all at Lotus, for not just his engineering skills and leadership, but also his passion for the Lotus brand, his humour and of course his driving skills during the shooting of the James Bond film, “The Spy Who Loved Me”.

Our thoughts are with the Becker family at this time.

RichardTheBruce

February 25th

1913: Karl-Gerhard (Gert) Fröbe is born--Oberplanitz, Saxony, Germany.
(He dies 5 September 1988 at age 75--Munich, Bavaria, West Germany.)

Gert Frobe, 75; Portrayed Goldfinger in Bond Movie
http://articles.latimes.com/1988-09-07/news/mn-1578_1_gert-frobe
September 07, 1988|BURT A. FOLKART | Times Staff Writer

Gert Frobe, the ginger-haired, rotund comic actor who portrayed what has been described as Ian Fleming's "kinkiest villain," Goldfinger, has died following a heart attack.

Frobe, a former violinist and cabaret performer, was 75 when he died in a Munich hospital Monday. He had suffered the attack last Wednesday, a day after he returned to the stage for the first time since a cancer operation in 1986.

Frobe was born Karl-Gerhard Frobe in Planitz in what is now East Germany. He was a natural-born comic, described by critics as Germany's version of American Danny Kaye.

In Nearly 100 Films
Frobe played in nearly 100 films, including roles in the 1961 U.S. production of "The Longest Day" and the British-produced "The Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines," filmed in 1964.

But he was best-known internationally for his role as the greedy villain "Goldfinger" who battled Sean Connery's James Bond in the 1964 film version of the Fleming thriller.

In the picture Goldfinger portrays a preposterous multimillionaire criminal who schemes to rob the U.S. Mint at Ft. Knox. Bond, of course, thwarts him.

The professional triumph Frobe managed in that film was overshadowed a year later when he was quoted in the British newspaper Daily Mail as saying: "Naturally I was a Nazi" during the Third Reich.

Frobe denied making the comment and insisted: "What I told an English reporter during an interview . . . was that during the Third Reich I had the luck to be able to help two Jewish people although I was a member of the (Nazi) party."

Despite Frobe's denial, Israel banned all of his films for months until Mario Blumenau informed the Israeli Embassy in Vienna that Frobe had indeed hidden Blumenau and his mother from the Nazis.

Frobe studied theater under Dresden actor Erich Ponto and Paul Guenther in Berlin during the early years of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.

After theaters were closed by the Nazis in September, 1944, Frobe was called into the German army, where he served until the end of World War II.

'A New Danny Kaye'
In his first major role in a film, "Berlin Ballads," which opened in European cinemas in 1948, film critics wrote: "Germany has a new Danny Kaye." In it he played a character called Otto Normalverbraucher, or Otto Normal Consumer, a soldier returning to a devastated Germany from a prisoner of war camp.

Although he was trained as a classical violinist and played his first recital on German radio when he was in his teens, Frobe turned his back on music to pursue a dramatic career.

Among his other films are "The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse," "Threepenny Opera," "A High Wind in Jamaica," "Is Paris Burning?" in which he played Gen. Dietrich von Sholititz, Hitler's commandant in Paris, "And Then There Were None" and "Bloodline."

1962: Actors Sean Connery, Lois Maxwell, and Bernard Lee prepare for studio filming to begin the next day.
1966: Operatie Donder (Operation Thunder, Flemish title) released in Gent, Belgium.

1995: BOND 17 films scenes on the frigate La Fayette.

2003: The Thunderball soundtrack is reissued on CD for the James Bond Remastered Collection.

RichardTheBruce

February 26th

1941: Commander Ian Fleming returns to London after establishing offices in Tangiers and Gibraltar
in support of Operation Goldeneye.
1950: Carmen Du Sautoy is born--London, England.
1962: Filming resumes at Pinewood Studios.
1965: Time Magazine observes a “Bond market” exists “From London to Los Angeles” involving Bond clothing, jewelry, pajamas, vodka, golf clubs.

1995: BOND 17 films more at frigate La Fayette.

GoldenEye "Frigate La Fayette" metal cover

2015: La Repubblica reports "The streets of Rome bring Bond to a standstill — car hits pothole, Craig suffers head injury." The culprit: loose sanpietrini ("little St. Peters")--hand-carved cobblestone on a narrow street.

International

James Bond Meets His Match — The Roman Cobblestone
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/02/26/389261059/james-bond-meets-his-match-the-roman-cobblestone"]https://npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/02/26/389261059/james-bond-meets-his-match-the-roman-cobblestone
February 26, 201512:06 PM ET | Sylvia Poggioli 2011


Pedestrians cross the cobblestone Via dei Fori Imperiali in front of Rome's Colosseum.
Gregorio Borgia/AP

The headline in today's La Repubblica was, "The streets of Rome bring Bond to a standstill—car hits pothole, Craig suffers head injury."

The newspaper reported that the accident occurred while actor Daniel Craig, reprising the role of the suave British spy in the 24th James Bond thriller, Spectre, was driving one of the movie's four custom-made Aston Martins on a narrow cobblestone street near the Vatican.

Craig reportedly hit his head on the car roof when the speeding vehicle met the irresistible force of a loose sanpietrino, as the Roman cobblestones are known.

Rumor has it that Craig flew home to London after being visited by medics on the set, but the production company played down the incident. Spectre has been shooting in Rome for the past week. The Rome leg is scheduled to last 10 more days, and Craig is expected to return soon.

Meanwhile, the Bond-meets-cobblestone affair revived a long-standing controversy between the pro- and anti-sanpietrini camps. A national consumer protection association, ADOC, issued a statement asking, "Are the potholes of Rome the real enemy of James Bond? It would seem so."

ADOC President Lamberto Santini said, "The streets of Rome pose a daily danger to pedestrians, cyclists, and car and motorcycle drivers who risk serious injuries. If James Bond can be sidelined, imagine the fate of our average resident."

The object of controversy is a beveled, hand-carved cobblestone made from volcanic rock. The sanpietrini — literally, "little St. Peters" — date from the late 16th century when Pope Sixtus V had all the main streets of Rome paved with cobblestones, because at the time they were considered the best pavement for carriage transit.

But in recent decades, there are fewer and fewer sanpietrino craftsmen or workers capable of fixing Rome's high-maintenance cobblestone streets (and sidewalks), which are at best uneven, at worst a series of yawning crevices. Taxi drivers complain of the damage to their spines from bouncing on the uneven streets their entire working day, and motorcyclists stress the damage done to tires. Pedestrians are prone to tripping over the many protruding stones and breaking bones. (You will rarely see a Roman woman wearing stiletto heels in old Rome.) And when it rains, the slippery sanpietrino poses serious dangers for everyone.

The city's public works council made headlines last December when it proposed removing the cobblestones on streets and sidewalks and replacing them with smooth asphalt, which requires less maintenance.

The proposal outraged scholars who say the sanpietrino is an integral part of the Eternal City's history and identity.

While city authorities ponder the issue, the Sam Mendes-directed movie continues shooting in the old streets of Rome. The script reportedly calls for a high-speed chase along the Tiber, with one or more cars flying into the river and James Bond parachuting from a helicopter onto the Ponte Sisto, a Renaissance bridge.

Along with Craig, the movie stars Christoph Waltz, Ralph Fiennes and Italian actress Monica Bellucci, who at 50 plays the oldest Bond girl ever.

Note: disputed by Executive Producer Robert Malerba.
https://roma.repubblica.it/cronaca/2015/03/07/news/mafia_capitale_peggio_della_spectre_quanti_intoppi_per_il_film_di_007-108951839/

moneyofpropre2

I don't want to disapoint you for the last part (lot of traduction effort), but exectutive producer Roberto Malerba said this was in reality a fake news : https://roma.repubblica.it/cronaca/2015/03/07/news/mafia_capitale_peggio_della_spectre_quanti_intoppi_per_il_film_di_007-108951839/

RichardTheBruce

Well that's just enriched Bond history, isn't it, @moneyofpropre2.

I'm adding it above, in perpetuity.

RichardTheBruce

February 27th

1962: A legal claim is served on Eon Productions to recover £1,064 for two musicians--Carlos Malcolm and Ernest Ranglin--proposing they had an agreement to compose, arrange, and oversee the recording of music for Dr. No.
1965: The "Goldfinger" title song charts in the US, eventually peaking at No. 8.

1979: Moonraker principle photography finishes in France.
1999: A court rejects MGM's request for a summary judgment to block Sony's planned Bond film--opening the path to an April trial.

Studios' Fight Over James Bond to Go to Trial
http://articles.latimes.com/1999/feb/27/business/fi-12167
February 27, 1999 | Associated Press

A federal judge rejected Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.'s motion for summary judgment in a legal fight with Sony Corp. over rights to the lucrative James Bond movie franchise, clearing the way for an April trial. MGM asked the court for a summary judgment in its lawsuit accusing Sony of attempting to steal the Bond franchise. U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie, who issued a preliminary injunction last year to block Sony from working on its own Bond film, rejected the motion, said Sony attorney David Steuber. "It's a very important win for us," he said. "It's encouraging that the ball is still in the air." In a statement, MGM characterized the ruling as a victory. "We can now proceed to trial to make our preliminary injunction permanent and for a declaration of our exclusive rights to make James Bond films," said Robert Brada, MGM executive vice president and general counsel. MGM is developing a 19th Bond installment starring Pierce Brosnan that is due for release in November.

2014: Artist-photographer Taryn Simon's exhibit Birds of the West Indies opens at the Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills.

Gagosian

Taryn Simon
Birds of the West Indies
February 27–April 12, 2014 | Beverly Hills
About Exhibition https://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/taryn-simon--february-27-2014



About
Gagosian Beverly Hills is pleased to present “Birds of the West Indies,” an exhibition of new work by Taryn Simon.

In 1936, American ornithologist James Bond published the definitive taxonomy Birds of the West Indies. Writer Ian Fleming, an active bird watcher, appropriated the author’s name for his own now famous novels. He found the name “flat and colorless,” perfectly suited for a character intended to be “anonymous…a blunt instrument in the hands of the government.” This co-opting of a name was the first in a series of substitutions and replacements that would become central to the development of the Bond narrative.

Conflating Bond the ornithologist with Bond the secret agent, Taryn Simon uses the title and format of the ornithologist’s taxonomy for her own two-part body of work, Birds of the West Indies (2013–14). The first element of the work is a photographic inventory of the women, innovative weaponry and luxury cars of Bond films made over the past fifty years. The resulting images comprise an index of interchangeable variables used in the production of fantasy. Testing the seductive surfaces of popular cinema, Simon continues her artistic process of revealing infrastructures of previously impervious cultural constructs. Simon also created a film that takes as its subject Nikki van der Zyl, the most prolific agent of substitution in the Bond franchise. From 1962 to 1979, van der Zyl, an unseen and uncredited performer, provided voice dubs for over a dozen major and minor characters throughout nine Bond films. Invisible until now, van der Zyl further underscores the interplay of substitution and repetition in the preservation of myth and the construction of fantasy.

In the second element of the work, Simon casts herself as the ornithologist James Bond, identifying, photographing, and classifying all the birds that appear within the 24 films comprising the James Bond film franchise. Often the birds are incidental; they function as background for the sets they happened to fly into. Simon analyzed every scene to discover these chance occurrences. The result is a taxonomy of birds not unlike the original Birds of the West Indies. In this case, the birds are categorized by locations both actual and fictional: Switzerland, Afghanistan, North Korea, as well as the mythical settings of Bond’s missions, such as the Republic of Isthmus and SPECTRE Island. Simon’s discoveries often occupy a liminal space—confined within the fictional space of the James Bond universe and yet wholly separate from it. In their new static form, the birds often resemble dust on a negative, a once common imperfection that has disappeared in the age of Photoshop. Other times, the birds are frozen in compositions reminiscent of different genres from photographic history. Some appearing as carefully conceived still lifes, while others have a snapshot quality. Many look low-res or obscured, as though photographed by surveillance drones or hidden cameras that might have been used by MI6 within the context of the films.

Simon also collected papers, correspondence, awards, study skins, and personal effects of James Bond the ornithologist, displaying them in vitrines alongside the photographic works. The character James Bond is so embedded in public consciousness that it is difficult to disengage from the fiction and view the ornithologist’s letters and effects independent of the cinema persona. In Birds of the West Indies, Simon creates a space in which fiction and reality collide and disappear, opening up a black hole that belongs to neither realm.

The fully illustrated publication Taryn Simon: Birds of the West Indies, which includes an essay by Daniel Baumann, was published by Hatje Cantz in 2013.

Taryn Simon was born in New York in 1975. She is a graduate of Brown University and a Guggenheim Fellow. Public collections include Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She was awarded the Rencontres d’Arles Discovery Award in 2010. Major museum exhibitions include “The Innocents,” Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2003, traveled to P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and High Museum of Art, Atlanta, through 2006); “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007, traveled to Photographer's Gallery, London, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, and Foam_Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam, through 2008); “Photographs and Texts,” Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (2011, traveled to Moscow House of Photography and Helsinki Museum of Art, through 2012); “A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters,” Tate Modern, London (2011, traveled to Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, through 2014); and “Birds of the West Indies,” Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2013).

Images https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/taryn-simon--february-27-2014/exhibition-images
Artist Info https://gagosian.com/artists/taryn-simon
Press https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/taryn-simon--february-27-2014/exhibition-press

RichardTheBruce

February 28th

1960: Ian Fleming's series of "Thrilling Cities" articles in The Sunday Times end covering Chicago and New York.
1963: The Daily Express story "Wanted - A Girl for OO7" prompts 200 to try out for the role of Tatiana Romanova at Pinewood.
1965: Τζέημς Μποντ, πράκτωρ 007: Εναντίων Χρυσοδάκτυλου (James Bond, praktor 007 enantion Hrysodaktylou, or James Bond Agent 007 Ancient Chrysodactylos, or Goldfinger) released in Greece.
1973: James Bond comic strip The League of Vampires ends its run in The Daily Express.
(Started 25 October 1972. 2066–2172) Yaroslav Horak, artist. Jim Lawrence, writer.

https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/tlov.php3



Swedish 1982 https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/semic_1982.php3


https://www.popoptiq.com/the-league-of-vampires/




Danish 1975 http://www.bond-o-rama.dk/en/jb007-dk-no32-1975/

1987: Stephanie Sigman is born--Obregon, Sonora, Mexico.
2003: La morte può attendere (Death Can Wait) released in Italy.

2010: Martin Benson dies at age 91-- Markyate, Hetfordshire, England.
(Born 10 August 1918--London, England.)

Martin Benson obituary
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/may/06/martin-benson-obituary
Often cast as villains, he appeared in Goldfinger and The King and I
Gavin Gaughan | Thu 6 May 2010 13.49 EDT

Martin Benson in the 1985 TV wartime drama Arch of Triumph Photograph: ITV / Rex Features

The actor Martin Benson, who has died aged 91, occupied a screen category filled in its time by Herbert Lom, with whom he acted on several occasions, and previously Conrad Veidt – that of the worldly, sophisticated, foreign villain. With jet-black hair, dark colouring and pronounced eyebrows on a thin face, he never seemed properly dressed without a tuxedo. As well as remaining furiously busy during six decades as an actor, he pursued several artistic disciplines.

Born into a Jewish family in London, he seemed briefly destined to become a pharmacist. As a gunner in the army during the seond world war, he organised entertainment for the troops, and produced a tour of Gaslight in aid of a fund to replace HMS Dorsetshire. By 1944, he had been promoted to captain and was posted to Alexandria, Egypt, where he built a theatre from scratch, assisted by his sergeant-major, another aspiring actor – Arthur Lowe.

Among Benson's earliest screen roles was an unbilled part for Alfred Hitchcock in Under Capricorn (1949). The King and I had its British stage premiere at Drury Lane in October 1953, with Lom as the King, and Benson as his court chancellor, Kralahome. Benson played the part again opposite Yul Brynner in the Hollywood film version in 1956. He also played the King himself in February 1955, when Lom was ill. Benson later asserted that "despite the reputation which Yul Brynner continues to enjoy, the more intelligent as well as intelligible performance came from Herbert Lom, notwithstanding a good deal less swagger".

Back in Britain and in modestly budgeted monochrome thrillers, he was on characteristic form in Soho Incident (1956) as a "big boss" running crooked boxing and horse-racing schemes. Venturing into television, Benson was among a repertory company of actors in the half-hour anthology Douglas Fairbanks Presents (1953-57), aimed at US television, shown in Britain as cinema shorts and as schedule-fillers in ITV's early days. Benson also worked on the scripts, where as many foreign settings were included as possible. Another rep company member was Christopher Lee, who called it a valuable training ground. He and Benson made up a comic double act for one segment, The Death of Michael Turbin (1953), as slow-witted east Europeans.

He was a regular, as the villainous Duke de Medici, in Sword of Freedom (1957-58). In 1958 and 1959, he played a barrister in the unscripted courtroom series The Verdict Is Yours and, in On Trial (1960), which recreated celebrated cases, Micheal MacLiammoir played Oscar Wilde, with Benson as his prosecutor, Edward Carson.

After a role in Cleopatra (1963), he was an American gangster coerced into taking a doomed car ride with the henchman Oddjob, in Goldfinger (1964). He was among a houseful of suspects in Peter Sellers's second outing as Clouseau, A Shot in the Dark (1964).

From 1960 to 1985, Martin Benson Films, based in Radlett in Hertfordshire, made more then 100 educational and training films, which Benson directed, wrote and occasionally narrated. Some were for Save the Children.

For Lew Grade's ITC series, the logical successors to the Fairbanks shows, he variously played corrupt South American ministers, Algerian majors, ruthless Turkish policemen and cigar-smoking gamblers. Submerged under green makeup, Benson played the Vogon Captain, an excruciatingly bad poet, in Douglas Adams's The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981).

Benson began painting in his stage dressing room, and in 1993 he staged an exhibition of his Shakespearean paintings at the Shakespeare Globe Centre, the subjects including Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Alec Guinness.

His later credits included Alan Parker's adaptation of Angela's Ashes (1999) and a 2005 episode of Casualty.

His wife Joy, son and three daughters, two stepdaughters and one stepson survive him.

• Martin Benson, actor, born 10 August 1918; died 28 February 2010

RichardTheBruce

March 1st

1910: David Niven is born--Belgravia, London, England. (He dies 29 July 1983 at age 73--Château-d'Œx, Switzerland.)

Actor David Niven's Dashing Life Ends at 73
https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/archives/la-me-david-niven-19830730-snap-story.html
By Michael Seiler and Times Staff Writer | Jul 30, 1983 | 12:00 AM


Cary Grant, Loretta Young and David Niven in "The Bishop's Wife." (File photo)

David Niven, whose clipped accent and thin mustache made him the personification of the British gentleman in more than 90 films spread over nearly half a century, died Friday in his mountain chalet in Chateau D'Oex, Switzerland.

Niven was 73 and moved to the Swiss Alps three weeks ago from his home in southern France.

"My uncle died peacefully and without pain," said his nephew Michael Wrangdah. "His last gesture a few minutes before he died had been to give the thumbs-up sign."

The Oscar-winning actor died after a months-long battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a debilitating nerve and muscle disorder commonly called Lou Gehrig's disease.

He had lost some of his power of speech and the use of his left hand, his wife told newsmen last March.

To generations of English-speaking peoples he was more than a first-rate film actor. Niven authored several books, including two well-received autobiographical memoirs, "The Moon's a Balloon" and "Bring on the Empty Horses," which confirmed Niven's reputation as a raconteur.

More than that, the books attested to the fact that Niven—a man of considerable charm, wit and sophistication—had an extraordinary life, filled with such entertainment industry giants as Darryl F. Zanuck, Errol Flynn and Humphrey Bogart, and political figures such as Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy.

James David Graham Niven was born March 1, 1910, in Kirriemuir, Scotland, the son of an army reserve lieutenant who was to die five years later during the World War I Gallipoli campaign.

Niven's widowed, financially strapped mother moved to England and young David bounced around from school to school. He was, quite possibly, "a thoroughly poisonous little boy," Niven said later in explaining his expulsion from one school. He finally ended up at Sandhurst, Britain's equivalent of West Point.

Young Niven's military career was relatively brief and undistinguished. He served three years as a lieutenant in a Scottish infantry regiment, two of them on the hot, dusty island of Malta where he did little more than polish his skills in rugby and polo—on horses borrowed from other officers because young Niven had little money of his own.

Niven disliked the army—he had gone to Sandhurst for lack of anything more promising to do—and the future of a junior officer in the peacetime army seemed dim.

The frustrations came to a head when Niven insulted a general and, rather than face court martial, resigned his commission in 1932.

Niven sailed off to Canada to visit friends, then went on to New York City where other friends, capitalizing on the end of Prohibition, hired him as a wholesale liquor salesman. But Niven flopped at that, and was little more successful at his next try—promoting a sort of rodeo-equestrian show in Atlantic City.

The unemployed but always-charming Niven drifted west to California, helped, as always, by a large circle of friends and acquaintances. He saw his first movie studio—Fox—when members of Loretta Young's family sneaked him past the guards under a rug on the floor of her limousine.

He was suitably impressed—"I just gaped and gaped and wondered if I could ever be a part of it," Niven wrote much later in "The Moon's a Balloon." Encouraged by his friends, Niven signed on at Central Casting on Western Avenue.

They listed him, back in 1935, as "English type, No. 2008. Niven, David."

Niven was on his way—slowly.

A chance meeting with old military friends on a British cruiser in Santa Barbara Bay led to a hangover and an introduction to director Frank Lloyd, who later signed him as an extra in the original "Mutiny on the Bounty"—Niven's first film appearance.

Lloyd passed him on to another leading director of the period, Edmund Goulding, who had Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer do a screen test, which got Niven nowhere. Another screen test of sorts—an appearance at Paramount before an imperially silent Mae West—was also in vain. (Nearly 40 years later, however, Miss West recanted and told a reporter that "Niven has charm where other men only have cologne.")

Third Man Out

Yet another screen test ended in failure when newcomers Fred MacMurray and Ray Milland both got contracts with Paramount after appearing opposite Claudette Colbert. But Niven, the third man tried out that day, got nothing.

There were occasional jobs as a $2.50-a-day extra—the first one was as a spray-painted "Mexican" in a low-budget cowboy flick—but for a while it looked as if Niven wasn't going to make it, despite his charm and growing circle of friends.

Nothing seemed to work. Not even luck.

One day Niven found himself playing polo against a team headed by powerful studio boss Zanuck. Niven, who was, of course, hopeful of impressing the film magnate, was instead chagrined when his borrowed mount bit Zanuck on the buttocks.

And then the immigration authorities intervened, pointing out that Niven's visitor's permit had long since expired. Niven was forced to take off for the Mexican border, hiring out as a gun bearer for rich U.S. tourists hunting in the hills around the then small, dusty border town of Mexicali.

At last, Niven got lucky when the legendary Samuel Goldwyn viewed his initial screen test, liked what he saw, and signed Niven to a 7-year contract starting at $100 a week.

"I won't put you in a Goldwyn picture until you've learned your job," Goldwyn told Niven. "Now you have a base. Go out and tell the studios you're under contract to Goldwyn, do anything they offer you, get experience, work hard, and in a year or so, if you're any good, I'll give you a role."

Fluffed His Only Line

Niven did just that—but in his own inimitable style. Goldwyn sent him to Gilmore Brown's workshop at the Pasadena Playhouse, then Los Angeles' premier showcase theater. Niven was given a one-line part in a play and, with a celebrity audience on hand for his opening night, managed to drink a bit too much backstage in an effort to calm his nerves. He made a shambles of what little he had to do. Brown banished him from the theater, but Niven's career prospered anyway.

Most of the parts were small at first. In Howard Hawks' production of "The Barbary Coast" (1935), Niven played a Cockney sailor who was tossed out of a San Francisco brothel into a muddy street. He was signed the next year to play a bit part in the Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy opus "Rose-Marie," but after filming his brief scene he left the studio, only to find out months later that his part had been re-shot with another actor.

The roles quickly got more meaty. Niven played an officer and friend of Flynn in "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1936), Capt. Clyde Lockert in "Dodsworth" (1936) and Fritz von Tarlenheim in "The Prisoner of Zenda" (1937). In 1938, Niven appeared in the classic "The Dawn Patrol" and the following year gained co-star status for the first time in "Bachelor Mother" with Ginger Rogers. Later in 1939, he played opposite Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon as the devoted but unloved Edgar Linton, Miss Oberon's husband in "Wuthering Heights."

Despite the early frustrations, only four years after arriving in Hollywood, the one-time British officer had become a genuine star, critically well received and an actor of increasing capability. Life outside the studios also was happy. Niven dated Hollywood's most beautiful women, shared a beach house (called "Cirrhosis by the Sea") and caroused with Flynn, and was a friend of the industry's most talented stars and directors—people like Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Fred Astaire, Ronald Colman and William Wyler. And he was a frequent guest of William Randolph Hearst at San Simeon.

But then World War II intervened.

Though he had long ago resigned his commission and probably would not have been drafted into service, Niven left Los Angeles soon after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, and after several false starts managed to return to England and gain a commission in an infantry regiment. He was assigned to a training battalion and, he claimed much later, out of infinite boredom volunteered for the newly formed commando units.

Niven, never at a loss for friends throughout his life, made a new one in Churchill, who occasionally invited him to his estate on weekends. On first meeting him, Churchill growled, "Young man, you did a very find thing to give up a most promising career to fight for your country."

But the, according to Niven's account, the soon-to-be prime minister added, "Mark you, had you not done so, it would have been despicable."

Niven saw action in Europe after the Normandy invasion and married an English girl, Primula Rollo, who was to bear him two sons. Niven rose from the rank of captain to lieutenant colonel during the war, and took time off to do a film overseas—"The Way Ahead" (1944), a glorification of the British infantryman.

The film, a government-backed propaganda effort, was directed by Carol Reed and written by Eric Ambler and Peter Ustinov. Ustinov, then a private in the army, doubled as Niven's orderly when they moved into London's Ritz Hotel to work on the movie.


David Niven, left, and Kim Hunter in "Stairway to Heaven. (File photo)

Niven did another film in England—"Stairway to the Stars" (1946)—and then returned to Hollywood, "thinking I was God's gift to the movies," he told an interviewer 20 years later. "I went to Sam Goldwyn, said I was being underpaid, and asked how soon I could get out of my contract. 'The minute you reach the street,' he told me."

It was a difficult time for Niven. His wife died in an accident at the age of 25 and his Broadway debut in 1951 as Gloria Swanson's lover in the unsuccessful "Nina" was a failure.

"I took a good look at myself," he said later, "still wandering vaguely about with a cup of tea in one hand and a duchess in the other. I was fast approaching that nervous no-man's land where actors feel down the backs of their necks the hot, sticky breath of leading men in their early 20s, while in front they see a solid phalanx of well-established character actors blocking their path. That is no place to hang around very long with a cup of fast-cooling tea and an aging duchess."

Later in the 1950s, life picked up for Niven when he married a young Swedish model, Hjordis Tersmeden. They were to adopt two girls. And then—with Dick Powell and Charles Boyer—he started the hugely successful television firm, Four Star Productions.

There was no fourth star, by the way, because, according to Niven, most of Hollywood was frightened by the power of the film studio bosses. But the production company was an incredible success. "Four Star Playhouse" begat "Zane Grey Theater" which in turn spawned "The Rifleman," which spun off "Wanted Dead or Alive," starring an unknown named Steve McQueen.

It went on that way through the late 1950s and early 1960s—Four Star in one year had 14 TV series on the air, including two of Niven's own—"The David Niven Show" and "The Rogues." And Niven was suddenly one of the richest men in Hollywood. He decided to take his money and his family to Europe—permanently.

Niven explained the move in "The Moon's a Balloon." Taxes were eating him up, he said; the smog, the freeways and nasty gossip columnists were all bothering him. But, more fundamentally, "Hollywood had completely changed. The old camaraderie of pioneers in a one-generation business still controlled by the people who created it was gone . . . the scent of fear was attacking to smog-filled lungs of the professional film makers, already resigned to the fact that their audience was brainwashed by television. . . . The pipe dream was gone—the lovely joke was over. . . . It was time to go."

Niven and his family moved to a chalet in Switzerland and, later, a villa overlooking the sea at Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera, where he was to live a luxurious existence to his death.

It was an expensive life style—skiing the best slopes, tiger-hunting in India and entertaining his next-door neighbors, Princess Grace and Prince Ranier of Monaco—and Niven managed it by working a good deal of the time on films, both good and bad.

He turned down the role of Humbert Humbert in "Lolita" because he feared it would tarnish his gentlemanly image, but he had a long list of successes.


Shirley MacLaine, David Niven and Cantinflas in "Around the World in 80 Days." (File photo)

There was "The Bishop's Wife" (1947), "The Moon Is Blue" (1953), "Around the World in 80 Days" (1956), "Bonjour Tristesse" (1958), "Separate Tables" (1958), "Please Don't Eat the Daisies" (1960), "The Guns of Navarone" (1961) and "The Pink Panther" (1963), to name some of the better ones.

Niven liked to say his career was composed of playing officers, dukes and crooks, but he won an Academy Award as best actor in one of them, "Separate Tables," in which he portrayed a retired British officer.

"I always thank Deborah Kerr and Wendy Hiller," he told an interviewer in 1978. "They won the Oscar for me. They had to cry in the picture, which they did so beautifully that when I spoke, the camera panned to them sobbing . . . and I got the award."

He liked to refer to himself as "a displaced Cary Grant," and he was like that almost to the end—witty, classy, charming.

Like the time a few years ago when an interviewer asked him this old stock question: What is your philosophy of life?

"Life to me, I guess, is a sort of super Grand National Steeplechase, with all sorts of hurdles to jump over and places to fall down," Niven replied. "The trick is not to worry about winning, but to get around the course as best you can without doing any damage to the other riders and certainly not to the other horses."

Or, in another interview, in 1978, when he acknowledged that the ranks of his friends were thinning rapidly:

"We have to face it," Niven said. "An awful lot of my age group has been called up already. So many chums have gone, Cooper, Gable, Bogart. To say nothing of men of my own vintage—Errol Flynn and Ty Power. But there's no way they're going to get me off. I just won't go. I'll kick and scream and make a terrible fuss."

[email protected]

On the set of The Sea Wolves.

1946: Lana Wood is born--Santa Monica, California.
1973: Bond comic strip Die with My Boots On begins its run in The Daily Express.
(Finishes 18 June 1973. 2173–2256) Yaroslav Horak, artist. Jim Lawrence, writer.

https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/dwmbo.php3


Swedish 1982 https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/semic_covers/x1982_2.jpg.pagespeed.ic.SOnYIp3wvf.webp


Danish 1974 http://www.bond-o-rama.dk/en/jb007-dk-no-30-1974/

2017: Dynamite Entertainment's publishes James Bond Black Box Issue #1, combining influences from the films and Bond's inner psychology from the novels. Rapha Lobosco, artist. Benjamin Percy, writer.

E




https://www.newsarama.com/36980-full-first-issue-james-bond-black-box.html

2018: The Royal Mint launches the Great British Coin Hunt collection.

2019: In the second of three nights Film Concerts Live! presents ‘Casino Royale in Concert‘ with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Sydney Opera House.

'Casino Royale’ in Concert at
the Sydney Opera House
https://bondonthebox.wordpress.com/2018/10/05/casino-royale-in-concert-at-the-sydney-opera-house/
On 5 October, 2018 / By Bond on the Box / In Film Screenings



For the first time in Australia, Film Concerts Live! presents ‘Casino Royale in Concert‘ with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the iconic Sydney Opera House from 28 February to 2 March, 2019.

Film: ‘Casino Royale’ (2006)
Location: Sydney Symphony Orchestra, NSW, Australia
Dates:
Thursday, 28 February, 2019
Friday, 1 March, 2019
Saturday, 2 March, 2019
Time: 8:00 PM – 10:50 PM (EST)
Tickets: $62 – $127

RichardTheBruce

March 2nd

1945: Trumpeter Derek Roy Watkins is born--Reading, England. (He dies 22 March 2013--Surrey, England.)

Derek Watkins: Trumpeter who played on every Bond soundtrack
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/derek-watkins-trumpeter-who-played-on-every-bond-soundtrack-8550572.html
Brian Priestley | Wednesday 27 March 2013 01:00


Bell in 2004: his playing echoed Jelly Roll Morton ( PA )

It is rare for orchestral musicians to gain an independent reputation with the public, as opposed to the admiration they earn from their colleagues. In more popular styles, the same rules apply even more forcefully to backing musicians. The trumpeter Derek Watkins gained some recognition latterly, thanks to his enviable record of having performed on the soundtrack of every single James Bond film, playing for the first of these, Dr No (1962), at the age of 17.

He was seen playing and also speaking, along with the composer Thomas Newman, in a promotional video for the most recent entry, Skyfall. Newman noted that "When [the film's director] Sam Mendes went out on to the podium after we'd finished recording and acknowledged Derek, you should've heard the orchestra. He had to take two bows because people kept applauding him." By this stage, however, Watkins had been diagnosed with cancer and was fund-raising for the charity Sarcoma UK.

Watkins got off to an early start, being taught from the age of six by his father, who also conducted him in the Spring Gardens brass band in Reading, of which his grandfather had been a founding member. He played in his father's dance band at the local Majestic Ballroom before turning professional in his late teens. Working in leading London bands, he soon established himself as a freelance player capable of meeting the demands of Ted Heath, John Dankworth and Maynard Ferguson (during the Canadian trumpeter's period of British residence).

His ability in the role of "lead trumpet" required not only interpreting written music in a way that satisfied its composers or arrangers, but executing it with the authority that enabled his brass colleagues to show both unity of purpose and tonal blend. In this capacity he was hired for the 1970s European tours of a notoriously demanding Benny Goodman. When he toured the US as one of the key backing musicians for the singer Tom Jones, he was lauded by the local musicians whom he worked alongside. One of his American equivalents, Chuck Findley, has called Watkins "the greatest trumpet player I ever met in my life, and I have played with them all".

He was soon a fixture in the so-called "session" scene that saw top professionals being booked by the hour to play previously unseen music at a level of accuracy that had to be heard to be believed. As such, he contributed trumpet parts to the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane", and appeared, usually uncredited, on recordings by artists as different as Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Robbie Williams, Placido Domingo, U2, Dizzy Gillespie and many others. Gillespie christened Watkins "Mister Lead".

He also worked for many European-based bands, such as those of Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland, Peter Herbolzheimer, James Last, and the famous Dutch radio ensemble, the Metropole Orchestra. Among his distinctive film soundtrack appearances the opening of Chicago (2002) and the trumpet work behind Shirley Bassey's title song for Goldfinger (1964) stand out. He was the natural choice for lead trumpet when John Altman was asked to augment the St Petersburg tank chase sequence for Goldeneye (1995) and Altman recalled Watkins' role on the rumba section of Shall We Dance (2004): "The director and producers had asked us to make the chart sound more 'over the top'. I asked Derek if he minded playing his lead part an octave higher in some spots. 'Sure, no problem!' This was the first take, and he doesn't miss one super A."

Taking on such essentially background roles meant that Watkins was unlikely to become a "name" performer, although he did make two albums in his own right. Increased Demand (1988) can be fairly described as "easy listening" in the positive sense, while Over The Rainbow (1995) has a definite jazz orientation, as does Stardust (made at the same time), which paired him with the American trumpeter Warren Vaché.

Watkins was also heard in specialised contributions to recordings by the London Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic, when playing their versions of popular music. Not surprisingly, he was also in demand as a teacher when time permitted, becoming Visiting Professor at the Royal Academy of Music and conducting workshops when on tour in Europe or the US. In the mid-1980s he entered into a successful business partnership with the acoustician Dr Richard Smith to manufacture handmade trumpets, cornets and flugelhorns under the imprint of Smith-Watkins.

Described by all who worked with him as an unegotistical personality with an unfailing sense of humour, and the epitome of reliability, he made an impact not only on colleagues but on all who heard him. John Barry, who wrote music for the first dozen Bond films, said that Watkins "never failed to deliver the goods".

Watkins, trumpeter: born Reading 2 March 1945; married Wendy (two daughters, one son); died Claygate, Surrey 22 March 2013.

1964: The Daily Express serializes You Only Live Twice starting this date.

https://illustrated007.blogspot.com/2016/12/daily-express-artwork-for-you-only-live.html

1965: Serialization of The Man With The Golden Gun appears in Domenica Del Corriere, illustrations by Tabet.

1968: Daniel Wroughton Craig is born--Chester, Cheshire, England.
1992: Animated series James Bond Jr. (his nephew!) airs its 65th and final episode "Thor's Thunder". Finally.
(First episode "The Beginning" aired 30 September 1991.)

"The Beginning".
IMDb Description: En route to his new school, Warfield Academy, Bond Jr. is chased by S.C.U.M. who is interested in stealing the Aston Martin DB5.


"Thor's Thunder".
IMDb Description: Captain Walker D. Plank and Skullcap are on the prowl in Norway to find Mjölnir, which gives infinite power to whoever wields it.

1999: Dusty Springfield dies as age 59--Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England.
(Born 16 April 1939--Hampstead, London, England.)

2003: Hodder & Stoughton publishes the Die Another Day novelization in hardcover.

2008: BOND 22 originally planned to film ten days at Cusco, Peru, starting this date.
(Cancelled for budget and scheduling reasons.)

2012: BOND 23 prepares second unit filming of the pre-title action in Turkey.
2019: London Comic Con schedule at Olympia National Hall includes George Lazenby, Charles Dance, and Toby Stephens. Ends 3 March.

George Lazenby to attend London Comic Con on 2-3 March 2019
https://jamesbond007.se/eng/event/george_lazenby_london_comic_con_2019

RichardTheBruce

March 3rd

1949: Gloria Hendry is born--Winter Haven, Florida.

2005: Puffin publishes Charlie Higson's first novel in the Young Bond series--SilverFin--in the UK.

RichardTheBruce

March 4th

2015: A statement issued by MGM and the Broccolis declares a James Bond musical is not being pursued--contradicting Merry Saltzman, daughter of Harry.
2019: Announced date for Cary Joji Fukunaga to begin filming BOND 25 at Pinewood Studios. Subject to change.

RichardTheBruce

March 5th

1962: Simon Abkarian is born--Gonesse, Val-d'Oise, France.
1966: BOAC Boeing 707 Flight 911 from Tokyo crashes into Mt. Fuji 25 minutes after takeoff. No survivors.

Broccoli, Saltzman, Ken Adam, Freddie Young, and director Lewis Gilbert were scheduled for the flight, but canceled when an opportunity to watch ninja demonstrations arose.

1966: Passenger jet crashes into Mount Fuji
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/5/newsid_2515000/2515321.stm
A Boeing 707 has crashed into Mount Fuji in Japan killing all 124 people on board


Eyewitnesses said they saw pieces of the
aircraft coming away before it crashed

The BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation) plane plunged into the wooded slopes of the dormant volcano, 25 minutes after taking off from Tokyo International Airport.

This was the third American-built aircraft to crash in the area in about a month. Early in February, a Japanese Boeing 727 crashed in Tokyo bay, with the loss of 133 lives. And less than 24 hours ago a DC-8 of Canadian Pacific Airlines crashed on landing at Tokyo killing all 64 people on board.

Witnesses who saw today's crash reported seeing pieces break off the Boeing in the air.

One said: "The aircraft was flying as high as Mount Fuji and I could see smoke at its tail. I heard a bang and afterwards the tail and the main fuselage broke apart and the aircraft began spinning down. Just before impact the nose and the fuselage parted."

Air currents
Two British teams of investigators are being sent to Japan to investigate the crash. An official from the United States Civil Aeronautics Board will also travel to Tokyo.

The plane had been grounded the night before the crash at Fukuoka in the south of Japan because of bad weather in the Tokyo area. It had flown on to the Japanese capital in the morning.

The crash occurred en route to its next stop, Hong Kong.

Captain Bernard Dobson, 45, from Poole in Dorset, was in command of the airliner. He has been described as a very experienced 707 pilot and had been flying these aircraft since November 1960.

Violent air currents can be experienced near Mount Fuji, which is the highest mountain in Japan.

Of the victims identified so far, 37 were American, two British, two Chinese, one Canadian, one New Zealander and 13 Japanese.

In Context
The investigation into the crash found the aircraft was trailing white vapour as it left Tokyo, then suddenly began losing altitude and parts of the aircraft began to break away.

Finally over Tarobo at an altitude of approximately 2000m, the fuselage came apart.

It is thought the pilot may have been trying to give his passengers a good view of Mount Fuji when he suddenly encountered abnormally severe turbulence, which caused the aircraft to break up.

1982: La espía que me amó (Catalan: L'espia que em va estimar, The Spy That Loved Me) re-released in Spain.

1998: Coronet Books publishes Raymond Benson's novel Zero Minus Ten in paperback in the UK.

2002: BOND 20 films Gustav Graves directing the fury of Icarus at OO7.

RichardTheBruce

March 6th

1920: Lewis Gilbert is born--London, England. (He dies 23 February 2018 at age 97--Monaco.)

Lewis Gilbert obituary
https://theguardian.com/film/2018/feb/27/lewis-gilbert-obituary
Film director whose long and varied career produced hits including Alfie and Educating Rita
Sheila Whitaker
Tue 27 Feb 2018 13.05 EST

Julie Walters and Michael Caine in a scene from Educating Rita, 1983, directed by Lewis Gilbert. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

The film director Lewis Gilbert, who has died aged 97, never sought the limelight: he always said he wanted his films to speak for him, and several of them, including Alfie (1966) and Educating Rita (1983), have become part of cinema history.

Alfie is the story of an amoral young man who philosophises to camera on sex, love and women as he pursues sexual encounters with one girl after another. Paramount wanted the setting moved to New York and Tony Curtis to play Alfie, but Gilbert held out for Michael Caine. Caine’s performance assured his career, and the film was nominated for five Oscars.

Alfie’s success brought Gilbert his first Bond film, You Only Live Twice (1967), to be followed a decade later by The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and in 1979 by Moonraker. Lewis wryly commented that in earlier years he used to make a feature film for less than the Moonraker telephone bill.

It was Gilbert’s wife, Hylda, who brought Educating Rita to his attention and, having resisted studio pressure, this time again to move the setting to the US and to cast Dolly Parton as Rita, he finally raised the finance, despite not having any distribution deals in place, and cast Julie Walters and Caine. The film received three Oscar nominations and Hollywood studios vied to distribute it. He followed this with Shirley Valentine in 1989 with Pauline Collins as a housewife striking out for freedom in Greece.

Gilbert was what he described as an unfashionable director and considered this to have been why he survived for so long in the film industry. “I’ve never been known for any one kind of film. So, I’m really somebody like a doctor who you call in when you want the patient to live, as it were.”

Lewis Gilbert described himself as an unfashionable director. Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian

Born in London into a vaudeville family, Gilbert began touring in an act, the Four Kemptons, with his parents when he was four. His love of theatre and film began there – he watched films, shown as part of the vaudeville programmes, from behind the screen. He went to a theatrical school when he was 12 and he also entered cinema as an actor, appearing in quota quickies, including The Price of a Song (1935) directed by Michael Powell, and Over the Moon (1939).

It was while he was appearing with Laurence Olivier in The Divorce of Lady X (1938) that Alexander Korda, the producer, offered to send him to Rada. Gilbert replied that he would rather direct and so was sent to Korda’s Denham studios in Buckinghamshire as a third assistant director. He graduated up the scale, working with Alfred Hitchcock on Jamaica Inn (1939) – “He was the man I learned the most from” – and with a variety of studios, eventually becoming a first assistant.

At the beginning of the second world war, Gilbert volunteered for the RAF and from there he went to the US Army Air Forces film unit, where he worked on documentaries with Hollywood veterans such as William Wyler, Frank Capra and William Keighley. This gave Gilbert his directing break, as Keighley, hating the British winter cold, preferred his Mayfair hotel to going out filming. During this time he met Arthur Elton, and on being invalided out in 1944 took up his offer of a job at Gaumont-British Instructional directing documentaries.

His first feature, The Little Ballerina (1947), a children’s film with Margot Fonteyn, was successful to the point where, after its Saturday morning children’s run, it was put out on a circuit release. His first major success was Emergency Call (1952, known in the US as The Hundred Hour Hunt), in which Jack Warner has a race against time to find three people with the right blood type to save a child’s life.

He co-wrote the film with Vernon Harris, who became a collaborator for more than 40 years. Gilbert followed this with Cosh Boy (1953, also known as The Slasher), featuring Joan Collins, an X film which was widely banned – “Today, you’d show it to 10-year-olds” – and Johnny on the Run (1953), the first film which he also produced.

Gilbert’s long and varied career included thrillers and a number of war movies – “The war was the single biggest influence in my life, a very traumatic time. I think it was natural in the years after the war had ended to make films that were part propaganda and part portraits of heroism.” These included Albert RN (1953), which the producers had originally wanted shot in 3D, The Sea Shall Not Have Them (1954) and Reach for the Sky (1955), Gilbert’s personal favourite, in which Kenneth More played the war hero Douglas Bader.

Michael Caine in a scene from Alfie, 1966;
Gilbert resisted the studio’s idea of casting Tony Curtis in the role.
Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Paramount

Then followed Carve Her Name With Pride (1958) the true story of the secret agent Violette Szabo, Sink the Bismarck! (1960), HMS Defiant (1962) and Operation: Daybreak (1975). This last Gilbert felt could never be commercial because “it was very realistic and very downbeat but it was a true picture, whilst the earlier films may almost have glamorised wartime”.

In 1959 he had an unhappy experience working with Orson Welles on Ferry to Hong Kong. Gilbert had wanted Peter Finch to play the tramp and Curt Jurgens to play the officer. Instead he got Welles as the captain. Aside from the poor script, Gilbert said, Welles hated Jurgens and every scene that involved both of them had to be shot separately. The film and the overall strategy failed.

The Greengage Summer (1961, also known as Loss of Innocence), starring More (the producers had wanted Richard Burton, but he decided on Alexander the Great instead), was a happier affair, although, during the shooting, a blight on greengage trees forced them to buy in supplies of the fruit from Harrods and stick them on to the trees.

He continued working well into his 80s, and directed Walters again on his last feature film, Before You Go (2002). Always highly professional in his work, Gilbert was also a charming, unaffected and kind man with a friendly welcome for everyone. He and Hylda loved attending festivals (especially the annual festival in Cannes, where they had a flat) and going to screenings to look at the widest possible range of new films from directors of all ages and, most importantly, happily discussing them afterwards.

In 1990, he was awarded the Michael Balcon lifetime achievement award from Bafta, and he was appointed CBE in 1997. In 2010, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, Bafta held an evening of celebration at which he was interviewed on stage by Walters. He published his autobiography, All My Flashbacks, and appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in the same year.

Hylda (nee Tafler), whom he married in 1951, died in 2005. They had two sons, John and Stephen.

• Lewis Gilbert, film director, producer and writer, born 6 March 1920; died 23 February 2018

1988: During Operation Flavius, British SAS kill three members of the Irish Republican Army in Gibraltar.

https://gosint.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/this-day-in-history-march-6-1988-operation-flavius/

1998: Tomorrow Never Dies released in Thailand.

RichardTheBruce

March 7th

1952: William Boyd CBE FRSL is born--Accra, Gold Coast, Ghana.

1970: Rachel Hannah Weisz is born--London, England.
1974: Tobias Menzies is born--London, England.
2000: Charles Gray dies at age 71--Brompton, London, England.
(Born 29 August 1920--Bournemouth, Dorset, England.)

Charles Gray
Actor who played a series of elegant cads - and a memorable opponent for James Bond
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2000/mar/09/guardianobituaries2
Eric Shorter | Wed 8 Mar 2000 21.16 EST

The actor Charles Gray, who has died aged 71, never wanted to be loved, but he won plenty of applause for his portraits of silken arrogance, self-importance, oily malice and egotism. Among his film parts were the wily Blofeld, James Bond's antagonist in Diamonds Are Forever (1971), and the chief apostle of evil in Terence Fisher's The Devil Rides Out (1967).

Gray endowed toffs, cads, crooks, and braggarts with hauteur and elegance. What gave them authenticity was his belief in them. The voice was commanding, though it rarely needed raising, and its tone belonged to high society.

Gray learned his powers of spoken speech as a young Shakespearian in Regent's Park, at Stratford-on-Avon and the Old Vic in the post-war heyday of Richard Burton, John Neville and Paul Rogers. The actor cut an imposing figure; and the voice and its inflections were under such control that together they served undetectably as Jack Hawkins's when that even better actor lost his voice from throat cancer.

Gray's shamelessly affected persona, which could be arrestingly camp or plain overbearing, sometimes spilled over into his private life in Kensington. Not as private as some neighbours, Gray used to entertain friends into the small hours on his apartment balcony. When asked why he cut such a self-important dash, he would protest: "I'm not in the least aristocratic in real life, old boy. I much prefer a pint at the local."

Born in Bournemouth, he spent his early adult years in an estate agent's office. By his mid-20s he felt the call of the stage; and under his real name, Donald Gray, made his first professional appearance in As You Like It (1952) for Robert Atkins in Regent's Park, playing Charles the Wrestler.

Changing his name to Charles for the next production, Cymbeline, Gray then moved to Stratford-on-Avon in walk-on parts and in 1954 joined the Old Vic. Almost immediately he created a stir as the messenger Mercadé, coming on at the end of Frith Banbury's revival of Love's Labour's Lost, with decor and costumes by Cecil Beaton.

By 1956 Gray was taking leads. One of his best was Achilles in Tyrone Guthrie's Edwardian revival of Troilus And Cressida. "Looking like a prize-fighter gone to seed, with muscle turning to flesh, a puffy, dissipated monster, alternately petting and tormenting his favourite orderly Patroclus," as Ivor Brown wrote in the Observer. Other Old Vic credits included Macduff to Paul Rogers's Macbeth, Lodovico to Richard Burton's and John Neville's Othellos, Escalus to Neville's Romeo, and Bolingbroke to Neville's Richard II. If neither his Bolingbroke nor Macduff could stir the audience, that would remain part of Gray's dramatic problem: however much we might admire his acting, he could never touch our feelings.

After a north American tour in those roles and as Achilles, Gray returned to the West End in 1958. In Wolf Mankowitz's musical Expresso Bongo (Saville 1958) he played Capt Cyril Mavors, condescending restaurateur.

In 1961 Gray was back on Broadway, this time as the Prince of Wales, later William IV, in Kean, Sartre's sardonic revision of the Alexandre Dumas play about the 19th century actor. When Peter Hall's newly formed Royal Shakespeare Company launched its contemporary season in 1962, Giles Cooper's black comedy Everything In The Garden did so well that it transferred to the West End; and Gray then took over as the aghast suburban husband who discovers in sundry pots and jars hundreds of pound notes, his wife's illicit earnings in Wimpole Street.

Back at the Old Vic later that year Gray revelled in the role of the voluptuous glutton, Sir Epicure Mammon, in Tyrone Guthrie's modern-dress revival of Ben Jonson's The Alchemist; and in 1964 he won the Clarence Derwent Award for the year's best supporting actor as the land-owning host of a party given to taunt the hero of Anouilh's Poor Bitos (Arts, Duke of York's and Broadway). Staying on in New York, Gray took the title-role in The Right Honourable Gentle man (1965), a Victorian politician and sexual hypocrite. Plenty of other stage credits followed.

Among small screen credits were Strickland in The Moon And Sixpence, rated as rivalling George Sanders in the film, the bland brother-in-law in Pinter's The Tea Party, the amorous TV personality in Fay Weldon's The Three Wives Of Felix Hull, an overbearing Randolph Churchill in Hugo Charteris's Asquith, the trouble-making judge in Blind Justice, the acerbic Sir Cathcart in Porterhouse Blue, an impoverished peer in The Upper Crust series and an imperious old buffer in Longitude.

Among film credits were Narrator in Jim Sharman's The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the satanic priest who duelled with Christopher Lee in The Devil Rides Out, the sinister butler in The Mirror Crack'd and Judge in Shock Treatment.

Charles Gray never married.

• Charles (Donald Marshall) Gray, actor, born August 29 1928; died March 7 2000

Revelator

The obit failed to mention that Charles Gray also played Mycroft Holmes on multiple occasions!

RichardTheBruce

(Of course also included out his role as Dikko Henderson in You Only Live Twice.)

RichardTheBruce

March 8th

1947: Carole Bayer Sager is born--New York City, New York.

"Nobody Does It Better" (Carole Bayer Sager/Marvin Hamlisch)

Nobody does it better
Makes me feel sad for the rest
Nobody does it half as good as you
Baby, you're the best

I wasn't lookin' but somehow you found me
I tried to hide from your love light
But like heaven above me
The spy who loved me
Is keepin' all my secrets safe tonight

And nobody does it better
Though sometimes I wish someone could
Nobody does it quite the way you do
Why'd you have to be so good?

The way that you hold me
Whenever you hold me
There's some kind of magic inside you
That keeps me from runnin'
But just keep it comin'
How'd you learn to do the things you do?

Oh, and nobody does it better
Makes me feel sad for the rest
Nobody does it half as good as you

Baby, baby, darlin', you're the best
Baby you're the best
Darlin', you're the best
Baby you're the best

Oh, oh, oh

2003: Die Another Day released in Japan.

2011: Daniel Craig appears in a charity video celebrating the centenary of International Women's Day.

Daniel Craig 'drags up' in James Bond charity video
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newsvideo/celebrity-news-video/8366190/Daniel-Craig-drags-up-in-James-Bond-charity-video.htmlDaniel Craig has taken on his most unusual role yet –
dressing as a woman while in character as James Bond.
2:28PM GMT 07 Mar 2011

The 007 actor appears in a two-minute video to mark International Women’s Day.

The film is aimed at highlighting inequalities experienced by women around the world.

The voiceover to the video is provided by Judie [sic] Dench, who plays Bond's controller M in the spy films.

She asks whether 007, as "someone with such a fondness for women", has ever considered "what it might be like to be one".

The video, created by the photographer and film-maker Sam Taylor Wood, has been made for EQUALS, a partnership of leading charities brought together by Annie Lennox to celebrate the centenary of International Women's Day on Tuesday 8 March.

2016: Sir George Henry Martin, CBE, dies at age 90--Colesshill, Oxordshire, England.
(Born 3 January 1926--Holloway, London.)

Sir George Martin obituary
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/mar/09/george-martin-obituary
The ‘fifth Beatle’, a talented musician and producer who oversaw
landmark albums and helped the band to stretch the boundaries
of sound recording
Adam Sweeting | Wed 9 Mar 2016 01.25 EST | Last modified on Tue 14 Feb 2017 12.58 EST

http://www.theguardian.com/music/video/2016/mar/09/producer-george-martin-beatles-yesterday-archive-video
Producer George Martin recalls making the Beatles’ classic Yesterday – archive video

The death of George Martin at the age of 90 is not only a sad blow to Beatles fans of all generations, but it also draws a line under a vanished age of the entertainment business. Martin’s work as the Beatles’ producer, overseeing such landmarks of popular music as Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road, has guaranteed that his reputation will live as long as that of his illustrious proteges.

Martin and the Beatles were stretching the known boundaries of sound recording almost every time they entered the studio. “When I started, there really weren’t more than a handful of producers,” Martin commented. “Now everyone thinks they’re a producer. Technology has been getting more sophisticated every day. You can make a tune that isn’t that great sound wonderful. This stifles creativity, because you don’t have to work for it, it’s already there.”

A trained musician, Martin possessed invaluable arranging skills. He helped the Beatles to find striking juxtapositions of sounds and electronic effects previously unheard outside the more freakish fringes of the avant garde, in the process helping to justify pop music’s claims to be something more than a cellarful of noise. But perhaps most important was his capacity for making his clients raise their game to levels they themselves hadn’t believed possible.

Martin sensed that it was more a matter of psychology than technology. “I realised I had the ability to get the best out of people,” he reflected. “A producer has to get inside the person. Each artist is very different, and there’s a lot of psychology in it.”

https://theguardian.com/music/video/2016/mar/09/beatles-producer-sir-george-martin-has-died-aged-90-video-obituary
Beatles producer Sir George Martin has died aged 90 – video obituary

After his groundbreaking work with the Beatles, Martin had earned his ticket to ride, and he worked with a spectrum of luminaries including Jeff Beck, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, America, Jimmy Webb, Kenny Rogers, Ultravox and Elton John. He produced Shirley Bassey’s theme song for the Bond movie Goldfinger (1964), and composed the score for a further Bond, Live and Let Die (1973), as well as producing its title song, which was performed by Paul McCartney and Wings.

Before rock’n’roll transformed his career, he had already been well known for his work with jazz and popular musicians such as Stan Getz, Cleo Laine, John Dankworth and Judy Garland, but what especially endeared him to the Beatles was his track record of producing comedy albums, particularly with the Goons and Peter Sellers. John Lennon and George Harrison were aficionados of Goon-humour, and they swiftly struck up a close rapport with Martin.

It has long been a part of Beatle mythology that Martin was the debonair toff who transformed the fortunes of four leather-clad scruffs from Liverpool, but the truth was not so cut and dried. “It’s a load of poppycock really, because our backgrounds were very similar,” Martin argued. “Paul and John went to quite good schools. I went to elementary school, and I went to Jesuit college. We didn’t pay to go to school, my parents were very poor. I wasn’t taught music and they weren’t, we taught ourselves.”
George Martin with the Beatles at Abbey Road.


George Martin with the Beatles at Abbey Road. Photograph: BBC/ Apple Corps Ltd/BBC

Born in Holloway, north London, George was the son of Henry, a carpenter, and Bertha (nee Simpson), a cleaner, and studied at St Ignatius college, Stamford Hill, and Bromley county school, in south-east London. Having taught himself to play the piano, he was running his own dance band at school by the time he was 16.

By way of second world war service, in 1944 Martin joined the Fleet Air Arm. He flew as an observer and achieved the rank of sub-lieutenant. It was there that he acquired the patina of patrician lordliness that would become his trademark, an effect intensified by his aquiline profile topped by a swept-back mane of hair. No wonder the acerbic John Lennon referred to him as “Biggles”. Paul McCartney commented: “He’d dealt with navigators and pilots. He could deal with us when we got out of line.”

After being demobbed in 1947, Martin studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, for three years, specialising in composition and orchestration. In 1950 he joined Parlophone Records, part of the EMI group of companies, and in 1955 was made head of the label. But it was not until 1962 that Martin was approached by the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, who, having had his group rejected by Phillips, Decca and Pye, was anxious to find a pair of sympathetic ears in the London-based record business.

Epstein almost failed to get anywhere with Martin as well, since the Parlophone boss considered that the Beatles’ demo tape “wasn’t very good... in fact it was awful”. But Martin recognised that the group had ambition and charisma, and once drummer Pete Best had been replaced by Ringo Starr, he could see that that the necessary ingredients were in place.

Nevertheless, even Martin had not foreseen the extraordinary blossoming of the songwriting talents of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Having started out writing shoddy, derivative tunes, they suddenly began churning out a goldmine of great pop songs, from I Want to Hold Your Hand and A Hard Day’s Night to Strawberry Fields Forever and Back in the USSR. Under Martin’s guidance, for the rest of the decade the band made advances in writing, arrangement and use of technology that transformed pop music. Strawberry Fields, in particular, is often cited by contemporary producers as a revolutionary achievement.

Though he will always be chiefly remembered for his Beatles work, Martin had numerous other achievements to his credit. Perhaps frustrated by being tied to the terms of his employment contract with EMI, in 1965 he formed his own independent production company, Associated Independent Recordings (AIR), which lent its name to the AIR studio complex on the Caribbean island of Montserrat in the decade till it was forced to close after a hurricane in 1989, and more recently to AIR studios in Hampstead, north London.

Besides being in steady demand as a producer, Martin participated in a TV documentary marking the 20th anniversary of the Sgt Pepper album in 1987, and in 1993 published a book, Summer of Love – The Making of Sgt Pepper. He examined various aspects of music-making in the BBC TV series The Rhythm of Life (1997) and in his books All You Need Is Ears (1979) and Making Music (1983), and produced the Beatles Anthology double-CD sets in the 1990s. He was knighted in 1996, and in the following year produced Elton John’s reworking of Candle in the Wind, in memory of Princess Diana. It became the bestselling single of all time.

In 1998, he masterminded his own musical swansong with In My Life, an album of Beatles songs performed by an all-star assortment of actors and musicians including Sean Connery, Goldie Hawn, Robin Williams, Celine Dion and Phil Collins. “I’ve had a bloody good innings,” said Martin. “Knowing that I would have to finish, I decided I would make my own last record. It’s a kind of tribute, too, to all the people that I’ve been lucky to work with over the years.”

However, there was still more to come. The six-CD set entitled Produced By George Martin: 50 Years in Recording (2001) was a survey of his entire studio career, and and it was followed by Martin’s illustrated memoir, Playback (2002). George and his son Giles were music directors of the Cirque du Soleil show Love (2006), a theatrical interpretation of the Beatles’ work featuring 80 minutes of their music remixed by the two Martins and staged in Las Vegas. In 2011 the BBC2 series Arena aired a 90-minute documentary, also called Produced By George Martin, tracing his life and career, with contributions from many of the artists he had worked with.

In 1948 he married Sheena Chisholm, with whom he had two children, Alexis and Gregory. That marriage ended in divorce, and in 1966 he married Judy Lockhart Smith, with whom he had two further children, Lucy and Giles. He is survived by Judy and his children.

• George Henry Martin, record producer, born 3 January 1926; died 9 March 2016

This article was amended on 10 March. The TV documentary from 1987 on the making of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band marked its 20th anniversary rather than its 25th.

Note: His death is recorded as 8 March, vice 9.

RichardTheBruce

March 9th

1915: Ruth Kempf is born. (She dies 9 September 2012 at age 97--Opelousas, Lousiana.)
1964: Sean Connery's first day of filming for Goldfinger--the pre-credit sequence.
1999: Roger Moore appointed as Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).

2015: Stephanie Sigman's presence is announced for Spectre.

RichardTheBruce

March 10th

1921: Cec Linder is born--Timmins, Ontario, Canada. (He dies 10 April 1992 at age 71--Toronto, Canada.)
1953: Paul Haggis is born--London, Ontario, Canada.
2016: Klaus Hugo (Ken) Adam dies at age 95--London, England. (Born 5 February 1921--Berlin, Germany.)

Ken Adam, Who Dreamed Up the
Lairs of Movie Villains, Dies at 95
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/12/movies/ken-adam-who-dreamed-up-the-lairs-of-movie-villains-dies-at-95.html


Mr. Adam’s production design work included the war room in the Stanley Kubrick film “Dr. Strangelove.”CreditHawk Films

By William Grimes | March 12, 2016

Ken Adam, a production designer whose work on dozens of famous films included the fantasy sets that established the look of the James Bond series, the car in “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” and, for Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” the sinister war room beneath the Pentagon, died on Thursday at his home in London. He was 95.

His death was announced by a James Bond Twitter account run by MGM Studios and Eon Productions.

Mr. Adam was hired by the producer Albert Broccoli, known as Cubby, to design the sets for the first Bond film, “Dr. No,” released in 1962. (The two had worked together on the 1960 film “The Trials of Oscar Wilde,” with Peter Finch and James Mason.) With a budget equivalent to about $300,000 today, Mr. Adam delivered the title character’s sleek, futuristic headquarters, his extravagant living room with wall-size aquarium and his creepy, grottolike laboratory.

The combination of futurism and fantasy became a trademark of the Bond franchise. “‘Dr. No’ started a new approach,” Mr. Adam told The Guardian in 2002. “I think they realized that design, exotic locations, plus a tongue-in-cheek element were really successful, and so it became more and more that way.”

In “Goldfinger,” the third movie in the series, Mr. Adam put Bond, played by Sean Connery, into an Aston Martin equipped with an ejector seat. He envisioned Fort Knox as a cathedral of gold.


Ken Adam, left, on the set of “Diamonds Are Forever,” with the actor Sean Connery. Credit United Artists, via Photofest

With “You Only Live Twice,” the fifth Bond film, Mr. Adam had more than half the total budget at his disposal. He spent $1 million of it building a volcano that contained a secret military base operated by the international terrorist organization Spectre.

“He was a brilliant visualizer of worlds we will never be able to visit ourselves,” Christopher Frayling, the author of two books on Mr. Adam, told the BBC in an article posted on Friday . “The war room under the Pentagon in ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ the interior of Fort Knox in ‘Goldfinger’ — all sorts of interiors which, as members of the public, we are never going to get to see, but he created an image of them that was more real than real itself.”

Mr. Adam, who was also the production designer for “The Ipcress File,” “Funeral in Berlin,” “Sleuth,” “The Seven Percent Solution,” “Agnes of God” and many other films, won an Oscar in 1976 for his work on “Barry Lyndon,” his second collaboration with Mr. Kubrick. He shared the award with Vernon Dixon and Roy Walker. He won his second Oscar, with Carolyn Scott, in 1995 for “The Madness of King George.”

Klaus Hugo Adam was born on Feb. 5, 1921, in Berlin, where his father, Fritz, a former Prussian cavalry officer, helped run S. Adam, a famous sporting-goods store. Klaus attended the prestigious French Gymnasium before the family, which was Jewish, emigrated to London in 1934.

In London he attended St. Paul’s School and became entranced by German Expressionist films, which he had not seen in Berlin. “They were so theatrical, these artists who dreamt up these fantastic dreamlike environments, and it struck a note with me,” he told The Sunday Telegraph in 2008.

Mr. Adam worked on seven films in the James Bond series, the last of which was “Moonraker” in 1979. Credit Eon Productions

He studied at University College, London, to pursue architecture as a way of breaking into production design, heeding the advice of Vincent Korda, a brother of the film producer Alexander Korda and a resident of the Hampstead boardinghouse run by Mr. Adam’s mother, the former Lilli Saalfeld. He enrolled in the Bartlett School of Architecture.

Shortly after the start of World War II, he joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. In 1943 he took his place as a pilot flying long-range bombing missions over Europe. After the D-Day invasion, his squadron flew support missions for troops on the ground.

He was hired as a draftsman on his first film, “This Was a Woman,” in 1948, and for the next several years worked on numerous films as an assistant art director. His work on “Around the World in 80 Days,” a 1956 film that won an Oscar for best picture, gave him cachet in the industry and elevated him to production designer for “Curse of the Demon,” a 1957 film directed by Jacques Tourneur, and “The Angry Hills,” a 1959 war drama starring Robert Mitchum and directed by Robert Aldrich.

The Bond films — he worked on seven of them, the last of which was “Moonraker,” with Roger Moore as the superspy, in 1979 — put him in the front ranks of production designers.

“To me, designing the villains’ bases was a combination of tongue-in-cheek and showing the power of these megalomaniacs,” he told The Guardian. “I think in the last Bond film I saw — although they’re brilliantly made action pictures, one chase after another — they lost the importance of the villain. I think the villain is just as important as Bond. But someone who simply wants to destroy an oil pipeline to me is just not sufficiently important as a villain.”

Mr. Adam won an Oscar in 1976 for his work on the film “Barry Lyndon.” Credit Hawk Films

His Bond portfolio, along with his work on “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” and two spy thrillers with Michael Caine based on books by Len Deighton, “Funeral in Berlin” and “The Ipcress File,” qualified him as one of the great Cold War image-makers. The Victoria and Albert Museum honored that achievement in 1999 with the exhibition “Ken Adam: Designing the Cold War.”

He described his relationship with the notoriously finicky and controlling Mr. Kubrick as creatively stimulating but dangerous to his mental health. “I was incredibly close with him,” Mr. Adam told BBC Radio’s World Service in 2013. “It was almost like an unhealthy love affair between us. And I had a breakdown eventually.”

The collaboration produced some of his most memorable work, most notably the war room in “Dr. Strangelove,” which he conceived as a vast bomb shelter with an illuminated table in the center, suggestive of a nefarious game of poker in progress.

The set inspired an accolade he treasured. “I was in the States giving a lecture to the Directors Guild when Steven Spielberg came up to me,” Mr. Adam told the BBC. “He said, ‘Ken, that war room set for “Strangelove” is the best set you ever designed.’ Five minutes later he came back and said, ‘No, it’s the best set that’s ever been designed.’ ”

Mr. Adam, who was awarded a knighthood in 2003, is survived by his wife, the former Maria Letizia.

Correction: March 15, 2016
An obituary on Monday about the production designer Ken Adam misstated the surname of one of the people with whom he shared an Academy Award for his work on “Barry Lyndon.” He was Roy Walker, not Roy Scott. The obituary also referred incorrectly to Mr. Adam’s work as an assistant art director on “Around the World in 80 Days.” It was not uncredited. And the obituary described incorrectly the 1959 film “The Angry Hills,” on which he was production designer. It is a World War II drama, not a western.
A version of this article appears in print on March 14, 2016, on Page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: Ken Adam, 95, Designer for ‘Dr. Strangelove’ and Bond Films, Dies.

RichardTheBruce

March 11th

1925: Peter Roger Hunt is born--London, England.
(He dies 14 August 2002 at age 77--Santa Monica, California.)

Peter Hunt
The man who cut down 007
https://theguardian.com/news/2002/aug/16/guardianobituaries.filmnews
Ronald Bergan - Thu 15 Aug 2002 20.16 EDT

The film editor and director Peter Hunt, who has died aged 77, was associated with the huge success of the James Bond movies, the longest-running series in the history of the cinema. He edited the first five Bond films - generally considered the best - creating a style of sharp cutting that has been emulated by many editors and directors of action movies.

He also directed one, On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), mistakenly thought of as the worst of the Bond films because of George Lazenby's forgettable 007. The inexperienced Australian model carried the can for the film's comparative box-office failure, but Hunt was praised for his pacy, and seemingly effortless, direction.

Already with a decade of editing behind him, Hunt only reluctantly agreed to edit the first Bond film, Dr No (1962). "I was really not interested in doing it at all," he recalled. "But, then I thought, well, if the director is Terence Young, and I know him well enough, and I find him rather nice, maybe it will be alright." Previously, Hunt had suggested to Harry Saltzman that, in his search for an actor to portray James Bond, the producer look at the film he had just edited, the feeble army comedy On The Fiddle (1961), in which Sean Connery played a Gypsy pedlar.

The editing style of the Bond movies was established because, "if we kept the thing moving fast enough, people won't see the plot holes," what editors call "chets", or cheated editing tricks. "On Dr No, for example, there was a great deal missing from the film when we got back from shooting in Jamaica, and I had to cut it and revoice it in such a way as to make sense."

It was from then that Hunt decided to use jump cuts and quick cutting, and very few fade-ins, fade-outs and dissolves, which "destroy the tension of the film". The fight between Connery and Robert Shaw on board the Orient Express, in From Russia With Love (1963), took a total of 59 cuts in 115 seconds of film.

Born in London, Hunt learned his craft from an uncle who made government training and educational films. His first claim to fame was, in fact, appearing on a recruiting poster for the Boy Scouts Association when he was 16, and he read the lesson at Lord Baden-Powell's funeral. At 17, he joined the army, and was almost immediately shipped off to Italy, where he took part in the battle of Cassino.

After the war, he returned to work with his uncle, before becoming assistant cutter for Alexander Korda, and a fully fledged editor with Hill In Korea (1956). He worked with both Terence Young and Lewis Gilbert on a number of films prior to editing their Bond efforts.

Besides editing, Hunt directed some second-unit work on the Bond films, as well as the title sequence for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). "I had a terrible time in the cutting room on You Only Live Twice (1967), with Donald Pleasance as Blofeld. Lewis [Gilbert] had made him into a camp, mini sort of villain. If you look at the film very carefully, Pleasance doesn't walk anywhere, because he had this mincing stride. He was so short that he looked like a little elf beside Connery. I used every bit of editing imagination I could so that he could be taken seriously as a villain."

Many purist Bond fans regret that Hunt never directed another 007 movie. His determination to be more faithful to the Ian Fleming original, even down to the death of the heroine (Diana Rigg) and the scaling down of gadgetry, puts On Her Majesty's Secret Service above many subsequent films in the series. It also happened to be the best picture he directed.

There followed two overlong adventure yarns set in Africa with Roger Moore, Gold (1974) and Shout At The Devil (1976); a couple of macho movies with Charles Bronson, Death Hunt (1981) and Assassination (1986); and the dispensable Wild Geese II (1985). But the work began to dry up, a situation that depressed the normally ebullient and energetic Hunt. In 1975, he settled in southern California with his partner Nicos Kourtis, who survives him.

Peter Roger Hunt, film editor and director, born March 11 1925; died August 14 2002

1965: Goldfinger released in Hong Kong.
1988: Sean Connery receives the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for The Untouchables. Earlier in the show he introduced himself as "Connery--Sean Connery."

2002: BOND 20 films the love scene with Bond and Miranda at the Ice Palace.