THIRTY YEARS AGO TODAY -GEORGE LUCAS' STAR WARS OPENED IN THEATERS.

In the spring of 1977 I was in New York working as an inbetweener on the animated film The Adventures of Raggedy Ann and Andy. I was working on Emery Hawkins Taffy Pit monster with Dan Haskett, Kevin Petrilak, James Wong and Carol Millican among many others. Mike Sporn was our head of cleanup and Eric Goldberg, Jim Logan and Lou Scarborough were among our crew. In those days,New York had comic conventions much like the San Diego comicon, but a bit more modest. And it was a great place to sneak preview upcoming films.

Another Raggedy artist named Lester "Skeets" Pegues went to a comicon screening at the old Commodore Hotel by Grand Central Station. I didn't go because it was showing too late and I had to commute back to Canarsie, Brooklyn. Skeets came in to work the next day raving about this cool new movie called "Star Wars" he said he never saw anything like it. I was unimpressed at first. I had seen Silent Running and Dark Star. No one really made Sci-fi films anymore, certainly nothing as intriging as 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. I was looking forward to real films like the French Connection II and Revenge of Billy Jack.

I was always the type that stayed away from films with humongous waiting lines. So I resisted the Star War phenomenon for a few more months until I saw it in Hollywood. It had moved from Mann's Chinese across the street to the Hollywood Theater, now called the El Capitan.

Well, I watched the title card move by and listened to the big music score and thought it wasn't that bad. Then the big Imperial Cruiser came overhead and I WAS HOOKED! It was one of the great cathartic moments in cinema. Nothing like it had ever been seen in movies before.

That year it was as if there was only one movie playing in any theater, Star Wars. The mania ran so far ahead of the planning that Christmas kids got Star Wars games under the tree that were an empty box with an IOU in it. It promised to provide a game as soon as they printed more.

You were right Skeets, it was pretty amazing. Happy Birthday Star Wars.
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If you were fast enough, the other day several sites like You Tube posted the trailor for the film THE ENCHANTED by Kevin Lima with animation by James Baxter's group. I managed to see it before Disney Lawyers yanked it.
I don't know what they're worried about, I thought it was great.
Congrads, mon freres!


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Birthdays: Miles Davis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Josef Broz Tito, Igor Sikorsky, Pontormo, Bennett Cerf, Claude Akins, Leslie Uggams, Bill Bojangles Robinson, Beverly Sills, Anne Heche, Mike Myers the voice of Shrek is 44

1878- Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore premiered at the Savoy in London. “So Stick to your desk and never go to Sea, and You can be the Leader of the Queen’s Naveeee”

1950- Brooklyn Battery Tunnel opened in NYC.

1957- Sid Caesar's Your Show of Show's cancelled after nearly a decade. The show used future star playwrights like Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner and Neil Simon. The show pioneered the executive strategy of network programmer Pat Weaver to not let the show be owned by an entire sponsor but the network would produce the show and would sell the sponsor commercial time in 30 second chunks. Pat Weaver’s daughter is Sigorney Weaver.

1961- THE SPACE RACE- The United States had been chafing about how far ahead the Soviet Union was in the exploration of space. In an address to Congress this day President John F. Kennedy pledged the wealth and resources of the U.S. to beating Russia to the Moon. "Our pledge is within the next ten years to send a man to the moon and return him safely to Earth… We choose to go to the Moon not because it will be easy but because it is hard!" The Moon landing was achieved in 1969. Today it is acknowledged that without the motivation of the Cold War the conquest of the Moon would have happened much more slowly. In 2004 President Bush made a similar pledge to go to Mars, but not much has happened since.

1965- The Saint Louis Gateway Arch dedicated.

1968- The Rolling Stones release Jumping Jack Flash.

1977- Star Wars opened.

1979- Ridley Scott's sci-fi classic Alien opened.

1980- Evangelist Oral Roberts sees a 900-foot Jesus over his bed.

1986- Hands Across America stunt to help hunger has 7 million people at one time holding hands at noon.

2000- It was revealed that in 1958 US scientists planned to explode an atomic bomb on the moon. There would be no mushroom cloud because that requires an atmosphere, and the flash would only be visible for a few seconds. What the purpose would be other than to scare the BeeJeezus out of the Russkies no one knew. This dumb-ass idea was soon scrapped.

Birthdays: Jean Paul Marat, Queen Victoria, Emmanuel Leutze, Bob Dylan, Walt Whitman, Gary Burghoff, Priscilla Presley, Patti LaBelle, Tommy Chong of Cheech & Chong, Frank Oz, Kristin Scott Thomas

1590- In Rome, construction of the great Dome of Saint Peters Basilica completed.

1830 –The poem "Mary Had A Little Lamb," was written.

1866 - Berkeley, California founded, named for George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne.

1899 - 1st auto repair shop and car garage opens: The Back Bay Cycle and Motor Company of Boston. Where's CLick and Clack?

1929- The Marx Brothers first movie comedy” The Coconuts” premiered.

1950- Married movie star Ingrid Bergman shocked American morality by having an open love affair with neorealist film director Roberto Rosselini. This day they were finally married but the outcry of conservatives about this “Apostle of Degradation” was such that her image needed a makeover, so she played Saint Joan.

1954 - IBM announces vacuum tube "electronic" brain that could perform 10 million operations an hour.

1958 - UP & International News Service merge into United Press International

1989- In Los Angeles, a spectacular fire destroyed the Art-Deco-Moderne all-wood landmark, the Pan Pacific Auditorium.

1991- Tri-Star Pictures 75 million-dollar mega-flop "Hudson Hawk" opened. Star Bruce Willis, whose fee was $17 million, blamed the film’s costs on union filmworkers’ rates being too high. He would return to his car after a day’s shooting to find it covered with animal excrement. The film coming after another flop Bonfire of the Vanities, almost sank his career. Willis next two films, "Death Becomes Her" and 'Pulp Fiction", he did for scale. In 2000 he made a $100,000 dollar donation to the SAG/AFTRA strike fund.

Birthdays: Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Scatman Crowthers, Rosemary Clooney, Artie Shaw, Joan Collins, Alicia de Larrocha, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Dr. Robert Moog –inventor of the first Music Synthesizer, Drew Carey

Today in ancient Rome was the feast of Vulcan.

1498- Mystic monk and religious reformer Savonarola was hanged and his body burned for defying the Pope and Church. Artists Michelangelo Buonarrotti, Sandro Botticelli and Luigi Della Robbia were admirers of his.

1701 -Captain Kidd was hanged in London for piracy, robbery and killing a sailor with a bucket. His last letter was written to try to bribe the judge with his buried treasure. His body was coated with tar for preservation and displayed in a gage suspended over Execution Wharf on the Thames for years afterwards as a warning for pirates.

1785- Ben Franklin invented bifocal glasses.

1873- The first Preakness horse race. The winner's name was Survivor.

1903- MOTHER JONES 'CHILDRENS CRUSADE- Seventy three year old activist and union organizer Mary "Mother Jones" Harris led a strike of 16,000 Philadelphia mill workers, all children under 12 years old, to demand a 55 hour workweek down from 60 hours a week. On this day she led a march of thousands of working children to President Teddy Roosevelt's home in Oyster Bay New York to demand the repeal of child labor.

1941-Hollywood union boss George Brown and assistant Willard Bioff (also a Frank Nitti bagman) were indicted on federal racketeering charges. Brown had been a Chicago operative and it was said 'he could drink 100 bottles of beer in one day". Their main contact among the Hollywood studio heads was Nicholas Schenck, the chairman of Loews Theaters and a head of MGM. Willie Bioff had tried to help Louis B. Mayer defeat the screen actor's guild and hijack the Disney animator's union. After their jail time Bioff blew up in his car after turning government witness and Brown 'disappeared...' Schenck meanwhile was pardoned by President Truman.

1969- The Who release their rock opera Tommy.

History for 5/22/2007
Birthdays: Lord Lawrence Olivier, Mary Cassatt, Richard Wagner, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, T. Bone Pickens, Judith Christ, Irene Pappas, Paul Winfield, Richard Benjamin, Susan Strassberg, Paul Winchell the voice of Tigger, Tommy John, Naomi Cambell

1915-The San Fernando Valley voted to become part of Los Angeles.

1925- First day of shooting on Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis.

1954- Bob Dylan’s Bar Mitzvah. Maseltov!

1955-The Golden Age of Radio ends when after 22 years the Jack Benny show came to an end. Once the top broadcast show in the nation, Benny went on to television.

1957- A U.S. B-36 bomber accidentally drops a Hydrogen Bomb on Albuquerque, New Mexico. The bombardier, Lt. Robert Carp lost his balance in the bomb bay area and grabbed for a handle that released the Nuke. He ran back to the cockpit yelling: "I didn't touch anything! I didn't touch anything!" The bomb blew up a mesa and killed a cow but miraculously the thermonuclear triggering mechanism didn't kick in. This was a classified secret until the late 1980's.

1966- Bill Cosby became the first African-American to win an Emmy Award for starring in a television series- I-Spy. The show was produced by Sheldon Leonard, who once worked on the Rocky & Bullwinkle Show.

1967- T.V. children's show Mr. Roger's Neighborhood debuted.

1985- Top Disney animation director Wolfgang "Woolie" Reitherman who directed the Jungle Book among other films, died in a car crash following lunch at the Smoke House in Burbank.

2001- Movie Mogul Ted Turners divorce from actress Jane Fonda became official. Their ten year marriage became strained when Hanoi Jane informed Ted that she had now become a Born Again Christian and answered his arguments with quotes from Scripture.

2002-Ayatollahs outlaw Barbie dolls from Iran. They denounce Barbie as "agents of subversive Zionist Western propaganda."

Birthdays: Plato, Fats Waller, Albrecht Durer, Andre Sakharov, Armand Hammer, Raymond Burr, animation director John Hubley, Dennis Day, Al Franken, Harold Robbins, Judge Reinhold, Mr. T. originally named Larry Terro

1885- The pieces of the Statue of Liberty leave for the U.S. I wonder if the crates said "Some Assembly Required"? .The sculptor, Felix Bartholdi was requested to do something so that “Liberty does not leave France”, so he a made a smaller copy of the lady that is placed on the Seine facing westward. She and the Liberty in New York are facing one other.

1878- Mr. D.A. Buck of Waterbury Conn. received a patent for a low cost mass produced watch. Within a few years he was selling half a million Waterbury Watches a year at $3.50 each.

1892- Leoncavallo's opera "I Pagliacci" debuts at La Scala.

1908 - 1st horror movie “Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde” premiered in Chicago.

1922- On the Road to Moscow , the first political cartoon to win a Pulitzer prize.

1927-LINDBERGH- Charles Lindbergh-Lucky Lindy, The Lone Eagle, etc. reaches a field outside Paris called Le Bourget after flying nonstop across the Atlantic. In a recent biography Lindbergh’s letters reveal he owed his life to hallucinations he imagined he saw in the back of his plane. There was no such thing as an auto-pilot yet and he had to stay awake and alert for 55 hours straight. He also had a Felix the cat doll to keep him company. Over Le Bourget huge searchlights were beamed on his plane and the light temporarily blinded him so that he almost crashed. When he landed people swarmed around the whirring propellor, narrowly missing another tragedy. But Lindy landed and history was made. It was possible to fly from America to Europe by airplane.

1945- BOGEY LOVES BABY-Humphrey Bogart married Lauren Bacall on a friends farm in Ohio. He was 48 and she was 21. Her real name was Betty Persky and when the publicity photographers came in, they were under strict instructions from Jack Warner to frame out of the shots Bacall’s more Jewish-looking relatives

1952- Actor John Garfield died. Some say he died in the midst of wild fornications; in truth he died alone of alcohol abuse at 40. The matinee idol of “The Postman Rings Twice” and “Kid Galahad” was too politically left for the conservative postwar age. When a young stage actor he had run guns to the IRA, later he supported progressive union movements, anti-fascism and desegregation. His outspoken politics got him blacklisted in Hollywood, his friends deserted him and he was ruined.

1952- Famed writer Lillian Hellman testified before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee HUAC but refused to name names. “I cannot cut my conscience to fit the fashions of the day.” She escaped a contempt of Congress wrap but she was blacklisted and at one point was reduced to working in a department store.

1968 - Paul McCartney & Jane Asher attend an Andy Williams concert.
Drugs are a terrible thing.

1968- Future President George W. Bush graduated Yale with a C Average.

1972- A Hungarian lunatic shouting I am Jesus Christ attacked Michelangelo’s statue La Pieta with a hammer. He is the reason why today we can only enjoy this beautiful sculpture from behind 3 inch thick bulletproof glass.

1979 - Elton John becomes 1st western rocker to perform live in USSR.

1980 – Star Wars “The Empire Strikes Back" premiered.

1983 - David Bowie's "Let's "Dance," single goes #1. The tracks featured a then little know guitarist named Stevie-Ray Vaughn.

1992- Tonight Show host Johnny Carson did his last show “I bid you a very heartfelt goodnight.” After a behind the scenes political tussle with David Letterman, comic Jay Leno became the permanent Tonight Show host. Carson retired into seclusion, and for the rest of his life jealously guarded his privacy, even refusing to appear for Tonight Show and NBC anniversaries.