I don’t think there is one person on the planet who doesn’t know what Hollywood is, or what cultural significance it has. It is a place where dreams are turned into reality, and reality turned into dreams, sometimes nightmares.
This is just a pictorial blog about that place we all love and sometimes hate, or rather what is produced there The most visible symbol of the district is the Hollywood sign that overlooks the area. First built in 1923 (a new sign was erected in 1978), the sign originally said “Hollywoodland” (to advertise new homes being developed in the area), but the sign fell into disrepair, and the “land” section was removed in the 1940s when the sign was refurbished.
Greta Garbo and the Dubliner Cairbre, he was the first lion used by MGM, and was born in Dublin Zoo.
Judy Garland on the set of the Wizard of Oz
D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks founders of United Artists.
George Reeves as Superman
On the darker side of the entertainment business, The Hollywood Ten were a part of an industry-wide blacklisting of individuals thought to be connected to or involved with the Community Party.
Psycho
Born to be wild-The filming of Easy Rider
In a galaxy far, far away-Star Wars
We are going to need a bigger boat, and probably cinema-Jaws the first block buster.
We all know Christopher Lee as Count Dracula, or as the Sith lord Count Dooku. Some of you may even know him as the evil wizard Saruman from the Lord of the Rings. Others may know him as the dentist father of Willie Wonka.
Few will know of his real life heroic exploits during World War 2 ,where he was attached to the No. 260 Squadron RAF as an intelligence officer where he was a liaison officer for the Special Operations Executive.
Even fewer will know him as a Rock star, Heavy Metal star even, yet he was.
Lee became a fan of metal in the early Seventies when he first heard Black Sabbath, whose guitarist Tony Iommi reciprocated the respect the actor had for his band and the genre it spawned. In a 2013 promotional video for one of Lee’s own albums, he told Iommi, “You are the father of metal,” to which the guitarist replied, “But you’re the one that started it, really, because we used to go watch Dracula and the horror films you did and that’s what influenced us.”
He worked together with Heavy Metal acts like Rhapsody of Fire and Manowar.
In late 2010 it was announced that Manowar were to rerecord Battle Hymns for a November 26 release. The album, Battle Hymns MMXI, was drummer Donnie Hamzik’s first studio recording with Manowar since the original 1982 Battle Hymns release. Orson Welles having died 25 years before, the narration during “Dark Avenger” was recorded by Sir Christopher Lee.
But prior to the Manowar’s re-release of “Battle Hymns” Christopher Lee had already released his first album.
“Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross” is a symphonic metal concept album . It was released on 15 March 2010. This was Lee’s first full-length album. It tells the story of Charlemagne, the First Holy Roman Emperor. The album’s promotional MySpace page garnered over 20 million hits globally The album features 2 metal bands, and a number of guest vocalists playing the different roles in the story. Music was composed by Marco Sabiu. A music video for “The Bloody Verdict of Verden” was released in June 2012.
Christopher Lee was 90(yes that’s right 90) when the single was released. That must surely make him the oldest Rocker ever.
He had released two albums previously. His first one “Christopher Lee Sings Devils, Rogues & Other Villains” released in 1998 was not Heavy Metal albums.
His second album “Revelation” from 2006 was a cover album and did include some heavy metal tracks. like “The Toreador March”.
In 2012 and 2013 he released two Christmas albums .titled “A Heavy Metal Christmas” (2012), and “A Heavy Metal Christmas Too” (2013).
2013 must have been a busy musical year for Sir Christopher lee, because he also released the follow up to “Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross” that year, titled “Charlemagne: The Omens of Death”
It was his fourth and final album and was released on 27 May 2013,his 91st birthday It is a sequel to his album Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross (2010). The music was arranged by Judas Priest’s Richie Faulkner, and features prominent Guatemalan guitar virtuoso and World Guitar Idol Champion Hedras Ramos on guitar, as well as his father, Hedras Ramos Sr, on bass.
This must make Sir Christopher Lee the coolest man on earth. He would have been 99 today. Alas he died on June 7, 2015, aged 93. But the man live a truly full life.
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What do the movies. Star Wars-The Empire Strikes Back,Toy Story 3,Juno,Where Eagles Dare and Distant Drums(and a few hundred more) have in common?
It’s not the cast or screenplay or even the studio but there are 2 seconds in all these movies which are identical. Those 2 seconds are called “The Wilhelm Scream” which is a sound effect.
The likelihood is great that you’ve heard the Wilhelm Scream at some point when watching a movie or TV show. The sound effect originated in the 1951 Gary Cooper film Distant Drums, and has become a Hollywood sound effects staple for more than 60 years.
At one point in the film ,Distant Drum , some soldiers are slowly walking through a dark swamp when one of them is fatally attacked by an alligator. At the moment when the alligator surprises him and drags him underwater, the soldier lets out the first known instance of the iconic scream.
The scream is often used when someone is shot, falls from a great height, or is thrown from an explosion. It has been used in 382 + movies and countless television shows.
However the name wasn’t used until 1953 In the movie ‘Charge at Feather River’, a character named Private Wilhelm gets shot in the leg with an arrow. He screams as he falls off his horse. Filmmakers used the Wilhelm Scream twice more in that movie as a stock effect to save money.
The famous scream was made mainstream by the Star Wars franchise. One of Star Wars sound designers named Ben Burtt was busy creating the sound palette for George Lucas’ Star Wars: A New Hope. He came across the Wilhelm scream and realized that a great number of filmmakers had used it since the 1950s, he decided to pay homage to the sound effect by incorporating it into the sci-fi classic. The scream can be heard in the famous scene in which Luke Skywalker shoots a Storm trooper aboard the Death Star and the unfortunate trooper falls off a ledge. In fact the scream is used in all Star Wars movies.
Research by Burtt suggests that Sheb Wooley, best known for his novelty song “The Purple People Eater” in 1958 and as scout Pete Nolan on the television series Rawhide, is likely to have been the voice actor who originally performed the scream.
On a different not but yet slightly related another used soundbite that has made it into many Movies/TV Shows and even Heavy Metal albums is the line “Dr. Davis, telephone please. Dr. Blair, Dr. Blair. Dr. J. Hamilton, Dr. J. Hamilton”
I heard it on the classic Queensryche album ‘Operation Mindcrime’ and it was bugging me for I knew I heard it before, and then I heard in an episode of the Cosby show and several other shows and movies.
In case you are wondering about the connection of the painting ‘the Scream’ (at the start of the blog)and ‘the Wilhelm Scream’ there is none, other then the actual word scream. I was looking for a picture of a scream and that was the best one.
Ending the blog with a compilation of ‘the Wilhelm Scream’
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No movie buff could ignore this day’May the 4th’ or better known as “May the 4th be with you”. The day that is now widely accepted as Star Wars day.
But why is that:
The original movie “Star Wars -A New hope” opened on May 25th 1977.
It would forever change the way movies were made, and left a footprint so deep in the culture that sometimes “culture” feels synonymous with “Star Wars.”
So why not have he 25th of May as “Star Wars” day. For a time it actually was the 25th.
The phrase ‘May the 4th be with you’ originates from something from a galaxy far far away from Star Wars. It actually comes from British politics.
The reference was first used on May 4, 1979, the day Margaret Thatcher took office as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.Britain’s Conservative Party celebrated the election of British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, by taking out a full-page ad in the London Evening News. The ad read, “May the Fourth Be With You, Maggie. Congratulations.” This was for Thatcher’s inauguration date as Prime Minister: May 4, 1979. In only two years, Star Wars‘ Jedi catchphrase was recognizable and influential enough even to be used in the soap opera that is British politics.
The date was chosen for the pun on the catchphrase “May the Force be with you” as “May the Fourth be with you”. Even though the holiday was not actually created or declared by Lucas film, many Star Wars fans across the world have chosen to celebrate the holiday. It has since been embraced by Lucas film as an annual celebration of Star Wars.
I will not go into whether May the 5th or May the 6th should be known as Revenge of the fifth/sixth as a pun on ‘Revenge of the Sith’ that would bring me to close to the dark side. To be honest this is not the Sith fan you are looking for.
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This blog is about 2 men of whom you could say “They just don’t make them like that anymore” Both Christopher Lee and Sir Alec Guinness were formidable actors and both served in WWII.
Christopher Lee
Famous for so many iconic roles like Dracula, Count Dooku in Star Wars prequels and Saruman in The Lord of the Rings. And lets not forget Christopher Lee was also an accomplished Heavy Metal performer and recording artist. However he showed his true grit in WWII.
In an interview with the Independent he said “When the Second World War finished I was 23 and already I had seen enough horror to last me a lifetime,”
When the Second World War broke out, Lee volunteered to fight for the Finnish forces during the Winter War in 1939.He and other British volunteers were kept away from actual fighting, but they were issued winter gear and were posted on guard duty a safe distance from the front line.
Christopher Lee enlisted in the Royal Air Force in 1940, where he worked as an intelligence officer specializing in cracking German ciphers . In North Africa he was attached to the Long Range Desert Patrol, the forerunner of the SAS,
As an intelligence officer attached to No. 260 Squadron RAF, he reportedly prevented a small mutiny after troops – frustrated and lacking news from the eastern front – threatened to break ranks.
For a while he was assigned to the Long Range Desert Group.
For the final few months of his service, Lee, who spoke fluent French and German, among other languages, was seconded to the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects Here, he was tasked with helping to track down Nazi war criminals.Of his time with the organisation, Lee said: “We were given dossiers of what they’d done and told to find them, interrogate them as much as we could and hand them over to the appropriate authority … We saw these concentration camps. Some had been cleaned up. Some had not.” He retired from the RAF in 1946 with the rank of flight lieutenant, and later again Jedi Master and Sith Lord.
Sir Alec Guinness
Sir Alec Guinness(center row third from right in the picture above) was one of the most versatile actors of all time. His genres included comedy,drama and science fiction. Probably most known for his portrayal as Ben Kenobi aka Obi Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars Trilogy.
The Bridge on the River Kwai is one of my favourite WWII movies, actually one of my favourite movies overall and it is mainly because of Alec Guinness’s convincing portrayal of Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson that makes the movie so compelling.
Alec Guinness de Cuffe was born to mother Agnes Cuff and an unknown father in Britain in 1914.
Guinness served in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve in the Second World War, initially as a seaman in 1941, before receiving a commission as a Temporary Sub-lieutenant on 30 April 1942 and a promotion to Temporary Lieutenant the following year.[Guinness then commanded a landing craft at the Allied invasion of Sicily, he aslo saw action in the , the invasion of Elbe,and Normandy and later ferried supplies and agents to the Yugoslav partisans in the eastern Mediterranean theatre.
During the war, he was granted leave to appear in the Broadway production Flare Path, which was a play about the RAF Bomber Command.
Two heroes on and off screen.
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We all know Jabba the Hut the big blob in Star Wars, he basically was a Mafia Godfather. However originally Jabba the Hut wasn’t an alien but a man from Belfast, well at least actor from Belfast.
Declan Mulholland was born on December 6, 1932 in Belfast, Northern Ireland as Thomas Declan Mulholland. He is known for his work on Time Bandits (1981), The Land That Time Forgot (1974) and The Onedin Line (1971).
In Mulholland’s scenes as Jabba, Jabba is represented as a rotund Human dressed in a shaggy fur coat. George Lucas has stated his intention was to use an alien creature for Jabba, but the special effects technology of the time was not up to the task of replacing Mulholland. The scene was to have a “stop-motion” character overlay him, but budget constraints forced George Lucas to cut the scene altogether, that is until recently. As part of the re-release of the Star Wars Trilogy, this scene has been re-inserted into the film. However, you won’t be able to see Declan, since Lucasfilm now had the funds to complete the production, inserting a Return Of The Jedi style Jabba The Hutt, over his character, once again.
A very brief clip of the “Han meets Jabba” scene from “Star Wars” as originally shot, with Mulholland as Jabba, was shown in the TV special, “From ‘Star Wars’ to ‘Jedi’: The Making of a Saga” in 1983, around the time of the original release of “Return of the Jedi”
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It’s no secret that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are good pals, but perhaps the best demonstration of their friendship is the fact that not even a $40 million bet has been able to come between them.
Star Wars has made creator George Lucas a lot of money over the year. But in 1977, he made a bet with fellow director Steven Spielberg that has wound up costing him over $40,00,000 so far, and all of it going directly into Spielberg’s pocket.
The bet was made when Lucas was visiting Spielberg on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977, before Star Wars: A New Hope came out. Suddenly, the two of them were arguing which movie would do better — but they were arguing for each other’s films. Lucas said CloseEncounterswould make more money, while Spielberg insisted on Star Wars.
So the bet was made: Each of them would give the other 2.5% of their respective stakes in their own film, if it was the most successful. And even though Close Encounters made a whopping $303 million, Star Wars trounced it, making $775 worldwide in 1977 alone.
Since then, Spielberg has continued to get his share from theatrical re-releases, home video sales, and more.Adjusted for inflation, the film has made $1.48 billion at the box office, It is estimated that Spielberg made $40 million.
What’s perhaps most remarkable is that Lucas supposedly actually made good on his bet with Spielberg — and the two have remained friends, teaming up for four Indiana Jones films in the years since the lopsided bet. Of course, the fact that they’re both billionaires may have made the wager a slightly less bitter pill to swallow.
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With the force being bestowed upon us very soon again with the last Jedi it is a good time to look back at some of the forgotten or lesser known Star Wars facts.
Darth Vader’s chest piece has Ancient Hebrew etched onto it. It reads: “His deeds will not be forgiven, until he merits”
The blizzard in the Hoth scenes was real. They were shot at Hardangerjøkulen glacier near Finse, Norway, and no special effects were used.
Qui-Gon Jinn’s communicator is actually a modified Gillette Ladies Sensor Excell razor.
The majority of Stormtroopers are left-handed due to the construction of their prop guns. They are modeled on the Sterling L2A3 9mm SMG (sub-machine gun), a military weapon from the 1950s with the magazine located on the left hand side.
E.T.’s species (Asogians) appears in The Phantom Menace at a political speech in the galactic senate.
Bounty Hunter Bossk from The Empire Strikes Back wears a costume from a 1966 Doctor Who episode.
Many of the buildings constructed to be used in shots of Tatooine are still standing in Tunisia. In fact, some of them are still used by locals.
Finally
Star Wars-Black Angel
For all of you die hard Star Wars fans who think that you have seen all movies in the Star Wars universe, more then likely you have not.
A long time ago in a galaxy not so far away, in fact this galaxy.
The 1980 short film was created to accompany The Empire Strikes Back in theaters. It was the directorial debut of Star Wars‘ pioneering set decorator Roger Christian and a special request by the big man himself, George Lucas. After it screened in cinemas, it suddenly vanished.
The film was shot at Eilean Donan in Scotland in autumn 1979. The budget of £25,000 was given to Roger Christian by an Eady Scheme fund from the UK government
Sir Maddox, a medieval knight, returns from the Crusades to find his home rife with sickness and his family gone. As he journeys through this mystical realm he encounters a mysterious and beautiful maiden, who appears to him as he is drowning. Sir Maddox learns that the maiden is being held prisoner by a black knight and in order to free her he must confront her captor, the Black Angel.
Star Wars is supposedly set somewhere in arthurian times and the crusades. Dark Angel ties in with that.
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I reckon at least 70% of all Star Wars fans will hang their heads in shame after reading this blog for not knowing this.I did after I heard about this.
“Rising to the challenge of a Skyhopper race against the cocky Fixer, Luke wins the race and the respect of his peers. When Luke spots the capture of the Tantive IV by the Devastator in the Tatooine sky, his friends ridicule him”
I know that all of you are scratching your heads now and are about to take out the Star Wars box set, for you don’t recall the above described scene.But let me spare you the effort and keep you safe from accidentally watching Jar Jar Binks again. The scene is actually not from any of the movies or the many spin off TV shows.
The scene is from “Star Wars the radio show”
An expanded radio dramatization of the original Star Wars trilogy was produced in 1981, 1983, and 1996. The first two radio series, based on Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, were produced and broadcast by National Public Radio (NPR) as part of NPR Playhouse. A dramatization of Return of the Jedi was produced by most of the same team and also broadcast on NPR.
Star Wars was a thirteen-part (6½ hour) expanded radio adaptation of the original Star Wars film, produced in 1981 and broadcast by National Public Radio as part of NPR Playhouse. It was adapted by Brian Daley and directed by John Madden and published by HighBridge Audio. It is the first in a series of radio dramatizations of the original Star Wars trilogy; Following its success, two more radio dramatizations were produced, of The Empire Strikes Back (1983) and Return of the Jedi (1996).
The series was made with the full cooperation of George Lucas, who donated the rights and allowed the use of sound effects and music from the films.
As with other Legends material, only material matching what was featured in the original film is considered canon, but many elements of the story first featured in the radio broadcasts were later referenced in other Legends stories. Many of the actors involved in the movie were unavailable to reprise their roles (Harrison Ford, for instance, was committed to Raiders of the Lost Ark), but Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels returned to reprise Luke Skywalker and C-3PO, respectively.
In October 2013, HighBridge Audio released two limited-edition, mp3 Collector’s Volumes: Star Wars: A New Hope – The Original Radio Drama, “Light Side” and “Dark Side.” Each volume includes the original Star Wars: A New Hope radio drama, an exclusive trading card from Topps, and rare audio content and interviews from the making of the radio drama
..Episode titles:
“A Wind to Shake the Stars”
“Points of Origin”
“Black Knight, White Princess, and Pawns”
“While Giants Mark Time”
“Jedi that Was, Jedi To Be”
“The Millennium Falcon Deal”
“The Han Solo Solution”
“Death Star’s Transit”
“Rogues, Rebels and Robots”
“The Luke Skywalker Initiative”
“The Jedi Nexus”
“The Case for Rebellion”
“Force and Counter Force
Billy Dee Williams reprised Lando Calrissian, and John Lithgow played Yoda at the same time Madden was directing Lithgow in the play Beyond Therapy. Hamill and Daniels returned to voice Skywalker and C-3PO.
Some other notable cast members were Ed Begley, Jr. as Boba Fett ,Edward Asner as Jabba The Hutt and Perry King as Han Solo.
In October 2013, HighBridge Audio released two limited-edition, mp3 Collector’s Volumes: Star Wars: A New Hope – The Original Radio Drama, “Light Side” and “Dark Side.” Each volume includes the original Star Wars: A New Hoperadio drama, an exclusive trading card from Topps, and rare audio content and interviews from the making of the radio drama.
Hopefully this blog and the hunt for the 13 episodes will keep you busy until the last Jedi.
Donation
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.
initially as a seaman in 1941, before receiving a commission as a Temporary Sub-lieutenant on 30 April 1942 and a promotion to Temporary Lieutenant the following year.[Guinness then commanded a landing craft at the Allied invasion of Sicily, he aslo saw action in the , the invasion of Elbe,and Normandy and later ferried supplies and agents to the Yugoslav partisans in the eastern Mediterranean theatre.
History of Sorts 
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