Previously on this day

Network is a 1976 New Hollywood drama film about a fictional television network, Union Broadcasting System, and its struggle with poor ratings. It was written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet, and stars Faye Dunaway, William Holden, and Peter Finch.

Chayefsky and the producer Howard Gottfried had just come off a lawsuit against United Artists, challenging the studio’s right to lease their previous film, The Hospital, to ABC in a package with a less successful film. Despite recently settling this lawsuit, the two men agreed to allow UA to finance Network. After reading the script, UA found the subject matter too controversial and backed out.

Chayefsky and Gottfried shopped the script around to other studios and eventually found an interested party in MGM. Network premiered in New York City on November 27, 1976 with a wide release following shortly afterward. The film won four Academy Awards, including Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Original Screenplay. In 2000, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. In 2006, the script was voted one of the top ten movie scripts of all-time by the Writers Guild of America, East.

Share this page

Head is a psychedelic motion picture starring television group The Monkees and was distributed by Columbia Pictures. It was written and produced by Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson, and directed by Rafelson. The film’s title appears to be a sort of joke as the Beatles had released the film, Help, and the physical beginning of a movie is called the “head.”

The distorted consciousness and psychedelic elements of Head resemble that of an LSD trip, a widespread recreational drug at the time. Some film critics now consider the film to be an allegorical deconstruction of The Monkees’ experiences as pawns of the Hollywood starmaking machine. The storylines and peak moments of the movie came from a weekend visit to a resort in California where The Monkees, Rafelson and Nicholson brainstormed into a tape recorder.

Head makes fun of the band’s image and the band members’ personae. A poor audience response at an August 1968 screening in Los Angeles eventually forced the producers to edit the picture down from its original 110-minute length. The 86-minute version premiered in New York City on November 6, 1968 and later debuted in Hollywood on November 20. It was not a commercial success but eventually found a cult following.

Share this page

A Nightmare on Elm Street is a 1984 American horror film directed and written by Wes Craven and the first film in the franchise of the same name. The film features John Saxon, Heather Langenkamp, Ronee Blakley, Robert Englund, and Johnny Depp in his feature film debut. Set in a fictional Midwestern town, the plot revolves around several teenagers being terrorized in their nightmares before the ghost of a serial child murderer named Freddy Krueger.

Craven produced Nightmare on Elm Street on an estimated budget of just $1.8 million, a sum the film earned back during its first week. Grossing $25.5 million at the United States box office, the film has become one of the most popular entries in the horror genre and the film’s villain “Freddy Krueger” has become one of the most well recognized villains in cinema history.

Nightmare on Elm Street’s premise is the question of where the line between dreams and reality lies. Freddy Krueger exists in the “dream world” yet can kill in the “real world.” Both critics and Craven have mentioned that the film owes some of its success to John Carpenter’s Halloween, which was hugely influential in spawning a long line of slasher films.

Share this page

Winona Ryder is an American actress that started her career in 1986. Although, she made her screen debut in Lucas, her first significant role came in 1988 with Beetlejuice in a performance that gained her critical and commercial recognition.

After making various appearances in film and television, Ryder continued her career with the cult film Heathers in a prominent and critically acclaimed performance. Her subsequent roles have won her not only critical praise but several awards. In 1983, when Ryder was 12, she enrolled at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco where she took her first acting lessons.

In Edward Scissorhands, she played the leading female role alongside then-boyfriend Johnny Depp and it was a significant box office success and received much critical devotion. Ryder also starred in The Age of Innocence with Michelle Pfeiffer and Daniel Day-Lewis and helmed by director Martin Scorsese. Her role in this film won her a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress as well as an Academy Award nomination in the same category. In 1999, she performed in and served as an executive producer for Girl, Interrupted based on the 1993 autobiography of Susanna Kaysen.

Share this page

Carrie Fisher is an American actress, screenwriter and novelist. She is most famous for her portrayal of Princess Leia in the original Star Wars trilogy. She was born in Beverly Hills, California, the daughter of singer Eddie Fisher and actress Debbie Reynolds. When Fisher was two, her parents divorced.

Fisher began appearing with her mother in Las Vegas at age 12. She made her film debut in the Columbia comedy Shampoo starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. In 1977, she starred as Princess Leia in George Lucas’ sci-fi film Star Wars opposite Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford. The huge success of the film made her internationally famous and her character became a merchandising triumph.

Fisher later appeared in The Blues Brothers in a cameo role as a vengeful ex-lover. She appeared on Broadway and went on to portray Leia in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Fisher also appeared in the Woody Allen film Hannah and Her Sisters. In 1987, she published the semi-autobiographical novel, Postcards from the Edge, and it became a bestseller. It was also made into a film in 1990 starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine.

Share this page

Re-Animator is a 1985 horror film directed by Stuart Gordon and based on H.P. Lovecraft’s story “Herbert West: Reanimator.” It stars Jeffrey Combs as Dr. Herbert West, a medical student who transfers from a school in Europe to the medical school of Miskatonic University to continue developing a formula to revive the dead.

The film has since become a cult film, driven by fans of Combs, extreme gore, and the successful combination of horror and comedy. The idea to make Re-Animator came from a discussion Gordon had with friends one night about vampire movies. He felt there were too many and expressed a desire to see a Frankenstein movie. Originally, Gordon was going to adapt Lovecraft’s story for the stage but then writers Dennis Paoli and William Norris and Gordon decided to do it as a half hour television pilot.

Gordon was told that the only market for horror was in feature films and was introduced to producer Brian Yuzna. Re-Animator was released on October 18, 1985 and went on to make $2 million in North America, well above its $900,000 budget. It was well-received by critics, earning mostly positive reviews, including Roger Ebert who gave it three out of four stars. It has spawned two sequels, Bride of Re-Animator and Beyond Re-Animator.

Share this page

Hugh Jackman is a Tony and Emmy Award-winning Australian actor of film, theater and television, known mostly for his roles in several major Hollywood films, including Van Helsing and the X-Men series. He was born in Pymble, Sydney, New South Wales and attended Pymble Public School and Knox Grammar School, an all-boys school, where he starred in the musical My Fair Lady.

Jackman later used his inheritance from his grandmother to attend the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts of Edith Cowan University in Perth, from which he graduated in 1994. His early work included appearance on TV and in the theater. He first became known outside of Australia when he played the leading role in the Royal National Theatre’s acclaimed stage production of Oklahoma! during 1998.

In 2000, Jackman was cast as Wolverine in Bryan Singer’s X-Men, replacing Dougray Scott. An instant star upon the film’s instant release, he went on to star in the 2001 romantic comedy Kate and Leopold, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe. He played the title role of a vampire hunter in Van Helsing in 2004 and won a Tony Award for his Broadway portrayal of Australian songwriter/performer Peter Allen in The Boy from Oz. In 2005, Jackman began filming his most challenging role to date in Darren Aronofsky’s science fiction film, The Fountain, which divided critics and did not do well at the box office.

Share this page

Richard Farnsworth was an Academy-Award nominated American actor and stuntman. After getting his start in films in 1937, he finally achieved stardom in 1982 with The Grey Fox. Farnsworth was born in Los Angeles and raised during the Great Depression.

He was working as a stable hand at a polo field when he was offered a chance to work as a stuntman. Farnsworth started by riding horses in films like the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races and Gunga Din. He made uncredited appearances in numerous films including Gone with the Wind, Red River, The Wild One, and The Ten Commandments. It was not until 1963 that he finally received his first acting credit.

Farnsworth largely appeared in westerns and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Comes A Horseman. His breakthrough came when he played a stagecoach robber in the 1982 Canadian film The Grey Fox. In 1999, he was nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award for the David Lynch film The Straight Story. Farnsworth was diagnosed and treated for prostate cancer in the early 1990s and by 1999, had been diagnosed as having terminal bone cancer. He made The Straight Story while in considerable pain. Farnsworth shot himself with a single bullet at his ranch in New Mexico on October 6, 2000.

Share this page

James Dean was a two-time Academy Award-nominated American film actor. His status as a cultural icon is best embodied in the title of his most celebrated film, Rebel Without a Cause, in which he starred as troubled stereotypical high school rebel Jim Stark. His enduring fame and popularity rests on only three films, his entire output. His death at a young age helped guarantee a legendary status.

His mother died at an early age and his father was unable to care for him so Dean was sent to live with relatives in Indiana. After graduating from high school, he eventually went to UCLA where he majored in drama. Dean quit college and pursued acting full-time, moving to New York City where he appeared in several television shows. He gained admission to the legendary Actor’s Studio to study Method acting under Lee Strasberg. In 1953, Dean was cast in Elia Kazan’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden as awkward loner Cal Trask.

Dean quickly followed this film with a starring role in Rebel Without a Cause and appeared opposite Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson in Giant. He became interested in racing cars and purchased a Porsche 550 Spyder. On September 30, 1955, Dean was driving his Porsche to a sports car race at Salina, California. He was driving west on Route 466 near Cholame when a Ford Custom Tudor coupe crossed into Dean’s lane without seeing him. The two cars almost head on. Dean was taken to hospital and was pronounced dead on arrival. He was buried in Park Cemetery in Fairmount, Indiana.

Share this page

Pulp Fiction is a 1994 film by director Quentin Tarantino, who co-wrote it with Roger Avary. A crime drama with a non-linear storyline, the film is known for its rich, eclectic dialogue, ironic mix of humor and violence, and its host of cinematic and pop culture references. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Tarantino and Avary won for Best Original Screenplay.

The first element of what would become the script was written by Avary in the fall of 1990 with the initial inspiration being the three-part horror anthology film Black Sabbath by Italian filmmaker Mario Bava. After he finished making Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino returned to Pulp Fiction, working on the script in Amsterdam in March 1992. Avary joined him, contributing one of the stories and participating in rewrites as well as the development of new, linking storylines. Initially, Columbia Tristar planned to finance the film but its chief executive did not like the script and it was taken to Miramax who agreed to make it.

Pulp Fiction premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and caused a sensation, winning the top prize, the Palme d’Or. The film debuted in the United States on September 23, 1994 at the New York Film Festival. It received positive reviews from numerous publications, including Variety, the New York Times, and Newsweek. It wound by grossing $107.9 million in the U.S. and $213 million worldwide, easily surpassing its modest $8.5 million budget. The film launched Tarantino’s career and revitalized John Travolta’s, who received an Academy Award nomination.

Share this page