I hate to be focusing on so many death notices, but this all seems to be the news lately. Mark Mayerson has a posting today about the death of producer Steve Krantz. Producer Krantz, the husband of romantic novel writer Judith Krantz, gave young director Ralph Bakshi his chance to make his movies Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic, two films that marked a new direction in U.S. animation.
Check Mark's posting http://mayersononanimation.blogspot.com

Birthdays: Frank James -Jesse's brother, Francois Poulenc, Ray Bolger (the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz), Al Goldstein the publisher of Screw Magazine, Stephen Ambrose,Pat Benatar, Sal Mineo, Jim Croce, Frank Sinatra Jr., Rod Stewart, Walter Hill, George Foreman, Linda Lovelace

1529- Michelangelo elected to design the military defenses of Florence. They failed to keep out the enemy but they must have looked really cool!

1888-date of LOUIS LePRINCE's claim of a patent on Motion Pictures, predating Edison 1893 and the Lumiere Brothers1895. LePrince even had as proof film he shot of his mother, who died in 1887. Despite this, LePrince could get no one to take him seriously. One day he boarded a train from Dijon to Paris and disappeared from the face of the Earth.

1924- Columbia Pictures created, ruled by Harry Cohn, who's motto was "I don't get ulcers, I give them!"

1927- Fritz Lang’s masterpiece film Metropolis premiered.

1939- Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov sold his first story to Amazing Stories Magazine "Marooned off Vesta".

1941- The comedy play ARSENIC AND OLD LACE opened on Broadway. When buying the movie rights Warner Bros agreed to wait until the play ended it’s theatrical run. They thought plays usually are done in a few months. Arsenic and Old Lace ran until 1944.

1949- For years the recording industry had been working on ways to improve the 78 RPM record –RPM means Rotations Per Minute. RCA records announced the invention of the 45 RPM record. Columbia (CBS) had announced the LP 33 rpm record and originally offered to share the technology but RCA (NBC) was having none of it. But the 33 stored more music and could use old 78 rpm turntables adapted so the 45 soon became a vehicle for hit singles.

1958- Jerry Lee Lewis single "Great Balls of Fire" topped the pop charts.

1958- GET MARRIED..OR ELSE! Blond actress Kim Novak had starred in Hitchcock’s Vertigo and was touted as the new Marilyn Monroe. In 1957 she began a love affair with black entertainer Sammy Davis Jr.. Davis was a member of Sinatra’s Ratpack and he challenged America’s racial barriers with his great talent. But this high profile interracial match was just too much for Hollywood society to handle. Columbia’s studio head Harry Cohn said of Novak-"That fat Polack Bitch! How could she do this to me?! " Legend has it Cohn called the Chicago Mafia and put a contract out on Sammy Davis. L.A. mobster Mickey Cohen told Davis’ father that if Sammy didn’t marry a black girl in 24 hours he would have his legs broken and his remaining good eye poked out. On this day in Las Vegas’ Sands Hotel Sammy Davis Jr. married black actress Loray White. Harry Belafonte was the best man. The couple honeymooned separately and divorced 6 months later. But the affair with Novak was over and Harry Cohn died of a heart attack the same year. In 1960 Sammy Davis married blonde German actress May Britt.

1992- The GREAT RUBBER DUCKY DISASTER- A North Pacific storm causes a ship to lose 29,000 bath toys overboard. They joined 61,000 Nike sneakers already bobbing in the water from a similar accident. Scientists used the rubber ducky migration to plot Pacific ocean currents around Alaska.

2004 NY based Writer and actor Spaulding Gray spent the day taking his kids to the movies. They saw Tim Burton’s Big Fish. Gray put is kids into a taxi home and from the Staten Island Ferry Terminal called his wife to say he would be home soon and that he loved her. Then he took the ferry, jumped into the harbor and drowned himself. He had waged a long battle with depression and his mother had commit suicide. His body did not resurface until March 9.

We all heard yesterday of the death of Iwao Takamoto at age 81.

Iwao Takamoto in 1945, courtesy of Berkeley/edu

Iwao was a young artist of Japanese descent who had been imprisoned at camp Manzanar with his family for the duration of World War Two. When he wasn't picking strawberries for local farms, he was drawing. When the Manzanar inmates were at last allowed to go home, friends suggested he try for a job at the Walt Disney Company. Iwao was hired as an inbetweener and his skills quickly brought him up to key assistant on such classics as Cinderella, Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. He was a lead on Princess Aurora on the film Sleeping Beauty. Many stories abound of his pickiness. Every morning the inbetweeners sullenly lined up in the hallway to show him their stuff and get little red x's where they went wrong. Assistants Stan Green and Bud Hester used to play tricks on them while they were waiting.

Leaving Disney in the early 60s' he landed at Hanna Barbera where he became a senior designer. From blank paper Iwao gave birth to Scooby Doo, Astro George Jetson's dog, Penelope Pittstop and the Ant Hill Mob, Dastardly and Mutley, Wally Gator, Peter Pottamus, Hong Kong Fooey and Jabberjaws.

Although Iwao became one of the most important artists at Hanna Barbera when it was called the General Motors of Animation, he was shy, retiring and gracious; content to let others take the spotlight. Even in the studios decline, Iwao was always there. When Hanna & Barbera had shrunk to a few offices in Warner Animation, Iwao was there every day.

In 2001 when my film Osmosis Jones was sharing offices with the preproduction of Scooby Doo, the Movie, I recall how their design team tussled with how to design Scooby, not realizing that the man who thought him up sat in an office on the floor above.

Iwao was blessed with good health and worked almost to the day he died. A gentleman and gifted artist, Adieu Iwao!

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Birthdays: Woody Guthrie, Richard Nixon, Ray Bolger, Roy Disney Jr., William Powell,George Balanchine, Judith Krantz, Bob Denver, Crystal Gayle, Joan Baez, Simone de Beauvoir, Sir Rudolph Bing, Herbert Lom, Gypsy Rose Lee, Joely Richardson

Festival of Janus, the namesake of January, Roman God of gateways and doors, not
to be confused with Terminus, God of borders and terminal points, Lemintinus the
God of Threshholds and stoops. Cardea the Goddess of hinges or Forculus the God
of the door leaves and sectioned doors.

1768- Former English cavalry sergeant Phillip Astley combined trick riding in a tight circular ring with a clown and some jugglers and took it all on the road. The first Circus.

1857- The Fort Tejon earthquake shook Los Angeles This was the last major quake in Southern Cal of the great San Andreas Fault, an estimated 8.0 !

1914 -John Randolph Bray takes out patents on the principles of film animation: cycles, arcs, keys and inbetweens. He even later tried to sue Winsor McCay, who had already been using them for years.

1924- The breakfast cereal Wheaties invented.

1936- Actor John Gilbert died of a heart attack after years of alcohol abuse. The accepted reason was he was a has-been silent film star who's voice was too thin and squeaky for talking pictures. Actually his voice wasn't too bad, some of it may of had to do with his punching Louis B. Mayer in the mouth when Mayer made a crude remark about Gilbert's sexual relations with Greta Garbo -something like "Why marry her when you're getting it anyway ?.."-BOP! . Mayer got up and screamed: "I'll ruin you if it costs me millions!"Gilbert's fading popularity and decline into alcohol as his second wife Virginia Bruce’s film career blossomed was the inspiration for "A Star is Born".

1939- Top Looney Tunes director Frank Tashlin was hired by Walt Disney. He quit after two fruitless years and left so angry he wrote a children’s book called the "Bear that Wasn’t" about his experiences. " I always pick the wrong people to pick a fight with." he said. An early vice president of the Cartoonists Guild, he also joined the Mouse House to help unionize the studio. In 1945 Tashlin went into Paramount’s live action division and became the director of the Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis comedies.

1959- The tv series Rawhide debuted, starring a young cowpoke named Clint Eastwood. President Lyndon Johnson was a Rawhide fan. In a recently released White House tape Dmitri Tiompkins’ theme from Rawhide can be clearly heard on his TV in the background."Rollin’, Rollin’ Rollin’; keep them dowgies moving…Rawhide!!"

1976- First day of shooting in Philadelphia of the movie Rocky. It was the first movie to utilize the Steadicam, a system that balanced hand-held camera shots.

Birthdays: Elvis Presley would have been 72, composer Robert Schumann, Jose Ferrer, Billy Graham is 89, Shirley Bassey, cartoonist Peter Arno, Yvette Mimieux, David Bowie, John Nierhardt, Bruce Sutter, Charles Osgood,publisher Frank Doubleday, Steven Hawkings. Soupy Sales, real name Milton Supman is 81. Can anyone out there remember Philo Kvetch or do the Mouse?

1889- Herman Hollerith received a patent for the electronic counting machine. The machine fed numbers onto punch cards and was used extensively in the U.S. census of 1890. In 1896 Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company, which later was renamed International Business Machines or IBM.

1904- Pope Pius X banned women wearing low cut dresses in front of clergy. He also tried to ban tango dancing.

1962- The Mona Lisa traveled to America and went on display today at the National Gallery in Washington. It was loaned in a deal brokered by Jackie Kennedy and French interior minister Andre Malreaux

1965- NBC TV premiered Hullabaloo, a Rock & Roll dance show with lots of mini-skirted go-go girls. ABC later came up with Shindig.

1973- Carly Simon got a gold record for "You’re So Vain".

1992- BARF! President George Bush Sr. projectile vomited on the lap of Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone in front of press cameras at a state dinner in Tokyo.

Birthdays: Jacques Montgolfier- balloonist and paper maker, Joseph Bonaparte- Napoleons older brother, St. Bernadette of Lourdes, Revolutionary War General Israel Putnam, Francois Poulenc, Butterfly McQueen, Adolph Zukor, cartoonist Charles Adams, E.L. Doctorow , Jean Pierre Rampal, Millard Filmore*, Katie Couric, William Peter Blatty the author of Jaws, David Caruso, Nicholas Cage- originally Nicolo Coppola is 43

HAPPY MILLARD FILLMORE DAY!! Millard Fillmore is famous, if you could call it that, as Americas most obscure and irrelevant president. So far. This day the Millard Filmore Society has a banquet in his birthplace of Buffalo, N.Y.
George W. who..?

1839- Frenchman Louis Daguerre announces the invention of Photography.( Just three weeks later on the 31st William Fox Talbot will say HE invented it first ). Despite the controversy of credit, the Daguerrotype photgraphic process becomes the popular system worldwide in the nineteenth century. The image of Lincoln on the five dollar bill is from a daguerreotype.

1894-" The Sneeze" The first motion picture film to be copyrighted by Thomas Edison and his engineer Canadian W.K.L. Dickson


1924- George Gershwin completed his Rhapsody for Jazz Orchestra, popularly called the Rhapsody in Blue. Ira Gershwin came up with the name after seeing a museum show of Whistler paintings with names like "Composition in Grey, Nocturne in Green," etc. It was comissioned by famed band leader Paul Whiteman, who gave Billie Holiday and Bing Crosby their starts. A retired band member of his I knew told me Whiteman had no sense of tempo nor could he carry a beat, and as a band member you quickly learned to play your part while ignoring his baton waving.

1926- George Burns married Gracie Allen.

1927- The first private telephone call from America to England.

1929-With the approval of Edgar Rice Burroughs artist Hal Foster began drawing the Tarzan comic strip. Burne Hogarth took over after Foster had a financial dispute with the publisher.

1934 –The First Buck Rogers adventures.

1935- Roger Sherwood’s play the Petrified Forrest opened to smash revues at the Broadhurst Theater on Broadway. Leslie Howard got great notices, but the real find was an obscure hard drinking actor with sad eyes playing the gangster Duke Mantee – Humphrey Bogart. In the audience was Jack Warner of Warner Bros, who decided Mr Bogart might just make it in motion pictures.

1943- Nikolas Tesla died. The inventor of AC current, rotary field motors and the Tesla coil, in his last years he had been experimenting with telegraphy and trying to develop a death ray for the US Army.

1961- In Providence Rhode Island a bunch of kids were stopped by police for driving a round a neighborhood store suspiciously carrying guns and masks. One 21 year old who did three days in jail for carrying a concealed weapon later became a pretty good actor- Al Pacino.

1966- A San Francisco hippie band called the Grateful Dead got their first gig playing a club called the Matrix. They would be one of the most successful rock bands in history, only breaking up after the death of their leader Jerry Garcia in 1995.