1.
Jumbo (musical)
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Jumbo is a musical produced by Billy Rose, with music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart and book by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. The musical opened on Broadway at the Hippodrome Theatre on November 16,1935, directed by John Murray Anderson and George Abbott it starred Jimmy Durante, Donald Novis, Gloria Grafton, and a number of circus specialty acts. Jumbo tells the story of a financially strapped circus, at the end of each performance, Durante lay down on the stage and permitted a live elephant to place its foot upon his head. The large 5, 000-seat theatre was turned into a tent where the various specialty acts performed during the show. The music was played by Paul Whiteman and his orchestra, bowers and Circus Specialty My Romance – Matt Mulligan, Jr. and Mickey Considine Little Girl Blue – Mickey Considine Act 2 The Song of the Roustabouts – The Razorbacks Women –Claudius B. Bowers, Circus Specialty, Allan K. Foster Girls and Dancers Memories of Madison Square Garden – Ensemble Diavolo – Mr. The musical was made into a movie as Billy Roses Jumbo in 1962, starring Jimmy Durante, Doris Day, Martha Raye and it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Scoring of Music-Adaptation or Treatment. However, one piece of business from the stage musical was repeated in the film. In both versions, Durante is working for a circus when its assets are seized by creditors. Durante attempts to sneak his beloved elephant Jumbo off the grounds, only to be confronted by a sheriff. Caught red-handed, Durante blithely replies What elephant, internet Broadway Database listing Joe Leblang Flyer promoting Durantes Jumbo on Broadway
2.
Joe Pasternak
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Joseph Herman Joe Pasternak was an Hungarian-born American film producer in Hollywood. Born to a Jewish family in Szilágysomlyó, Austria-Hungary, Pasternak was a film producer in Germany. He worked for Universal Pictures in Europe, where he made German-language musicals for the international market and he hit upon a successful formula, building light musical comedies around an adolescent soprano. Following the establishment of the Nazi regime, Pasternak emigrated to the United States, at Universals Hollywood studio in 1936. Pasternak cast 14-year-old Canadian singer Deanna Durbin in Three Smart Girls, the film became a huge hit and reputedly saved Universal from bankruptcy. Pasternak produced a string of Durbin musicals, and soon discovered another talented soprano, who began her own series in 1939. Pasternak proved to be an asset for the studio, generating a number of popular films, including Destry Rides Again. His career as a film producer spanned 40 years and earned him two Oscar nominations and three Golden Globe Award nominations and he retired in 1968, having produced more than ninety feature-length films as well as three Academy Award shows. Pasternak is the father of Michael Joseph Pasternak, the disk jockey known as Emperor Rosko, Jeff Pasternak, a playwright and songwriter, and Peter Pasternak. Joe Pasternak died in Beverly Hills, California from complications arising from Parkinsons disease six days shy of his 90th birthday and he is interred in the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California. For his contribution to the picture industry, Joe Pasternak has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1541 N. Joe Pasternak at the Internet Movie Database Joe Pasternak at Find a Grave
3.
Ben Hecht
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Ben Hecht /ˈhɛkt/ was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, journalist and novelist. A journalist in his youth, he went on to write thirty-five books and he received screen credits, alone or in collaboration, for the stories or screenplays of some seventy films. In the 1910s and early 1920s, Hecht became a noted journalist, foreign correspondent, in the 1920s, his co-authored, reporter-themed play, The Front Page, became a Broadway hit. The Dictionary of Literary Biography - American Screenwriters calls him one of the most successful screenwriters in the history of motion pictures, Hecht received the first Academy Award for Original Screenplay, for Underworld. Many of the screenplays he worked on are now considered classics and he also provided story ideas for such films as Stagecoach. Film historian Richard Corliss called him the Hollywood screenwriter, someone who personified Hollywood itself, in 1940, he wrote, produced, and directed, Angels Over Broadway, which was nominated for Best Screenplay. In total, six of his movie screenplays were nominated for Academy Awards, of his seventy to ninety screenplays, he wrote many anonymously to avoid the British boycott of his work in the late 1940s and early 1950s. According to his autobiography, he never spent more than eight weeks on a script, in 1983,19 years after his death, Ben Hecht was posthumously inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. Hecht was born in New York City, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants and his father, Joseph Hecht, worked in the garment industry. His father and mother, Sarah Swernofsky Hecht, had immigrated to New York from Minsk, the family moved to Racine, Wisconsin, where Ben attended high school. When Hecht was in his teens he would spend the summers with an uncle in Chicago. On the road much of the time, his father did not have effect on Hecht’s childhood. Film author Scott Siegal wrote, He was considered a prodigy at age ten, seemingly on his way to a career as a concert violinist. After graduating from school in 1910, at age sixteen Hecht moved to Chicago. He lived with relatives, and started a career in journalism and he found work as a reporter, first for the Chicago Journal, and later with the Chicago Daily News. He was an excellent reporter who worked on several Chicago papers, after World War I, Hecht was sent to cover Berlin for the Chicago Daily News. There he wrote his first and most successful novel, Erik Dorn and it was a sensational debut for Hecht as a serious writer. The 1969 movie, Gaily, Gaily, directed by Norman Jewison, the film was nominated for three Oscars
4.
Sidney Sheldon
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Sidney Sheldon was an American writer and producer. He went on to work in television, where his works spanned a 20-year period during which he created The Patty Duke Show, I Dream of Jeannie and Hart to Hart. He became most famous after he turned 50 and began writing best-selling romantic suspense novels, such as Master of the Game, The Other Side of Midnight and he is the seventh best selling fiction writer of all time. Sheldon was born Sidney Schechtel in Chicago, Illinois and his parents, of Russian Jewish ancestry, were Ascher “Otto” Schechtel, manager of a jewelry store, and Natalie Marcus. At 10, Sidney made his first sale, US$5 for a poem, during the Depression, he worked at a variety of jobs, and after graduating from East High School, he attended Northwestern University on a scholarship and contributed short plays to drama groups. He had to drop out six months during the Depression era to help support his family. In 1937, Sheldon moved to Hollywood, California, where he reviewed scripts, Sheldon enlisted in the military during World War II as a pilot in the War Training Service, a branch of the Army Air Corps, His unit was disbanded before he saw any action. Returning to civilian life, he moved to New York City where he began writing musicals for the Broadway stage while continuing to write screenplays for both MGM Studios and Paramount Pictures. He earned a reputation as a writer, for example. His success on Broadway brought him back to Hollywood where his first assignment was The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, which earned him the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay of 1947. He was one of the writers on the screenplay for the 1948 musical film Easter Parade and sole writer for the 1950 musical film Annie Get Your Gun, when television became the new popular medium, he decided to try his hand in it. I suppose I needed money, he remembered, I met Patty Duke one day at lunch. So I produced The Patty Duke Show, and I did something else in TV ever did. For seven years, I wrote almost every episode of the series. Sheldon created, produced and wrote I Dream of Jeannie in his capacity with Screen Gems. He wrote all but two dozen scripts in five years, sometimes using three pseudonyms while simultaneously writing scripts for The Patty Duke Show and he also used the same pseudonyms in writing all seventeen episodes of Nancy. He later admitted that he did this because he felt his name was appearing too often in the credits as creator, producer and he also created and wrote for the series Hart to Hart. Production for I Dream of Jeannie ended in 1970 after five seasons and it was During the last year of I Dream of Jeannie, I decided to try a novel, he said in 1982
5.
Doris Day
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Doris Day is a retired American actress and singer, and continuing animal welfare activist. After she began her career as a big band singer in 1939, her popularity increased with her first hit recording Sentimental Journey, in 1948, Day was given a key part in the film Romance on the High Seas, despite not having any acting experience. Its director, Michael Curtiz, gave her the part since she looked like the All-American Girl and it led to a 20-year career in film, including a string of musicals and romantic comedies beginning in the 1950s. She starred with leading men such as Clark Gable in Teachers Pet, Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk and Send Me No Flowers, Cary Grant in That Touch of Mink and she was usually one of the top 10 singers between 1951 and 1966. As an actress, she became the biggest female star in the early 1960s. In 2011 – well into her late 80s – she released her 29th studio album, My Heart, among her awards, Day has received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and a Legend Award from the Society of Singers. She has been Oscar nominated six times, and in 1989 was given the Cecil B, deMille Award for lifetime achievement in motion pictures. In 2004, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom followed in 2011 by the Los Angeles Film Critics Associations Career Achievement Award. Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff was born on April 3,1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the daughter of Alma Sophia, a housewife, and William Joseph Kappelhoff, All of her grandparents were German immigrants. The youngest of three siblings, she had two brothers, Richard and Paul, several years older. Due to her fathers alleged infidelity, her parents separated and she developed an early interest in dance, and in the mid-1930s formed a dance duo with Jerry Doherty that performed locally in Cincinnati. A car accident on October 13,1937, injured her legs, while recovering, Day started to sing along with the radio and discovered a talent she did not know she had. But the one radio voice I listened to above others belonged to Ella Fitzgerald. There was a quality to her voice that fascinated me, and Id sing along with her, trying to catch the subtle ways she shaded her voice, observing her daughter rekindled Almas interest in show business, and she decided to give Doris singing lessons. She engaged a teacher, Grace Raine, after three lessons, Raine told Alma that young Doris had tremendous potential, which led Alma to give her daughter three lessons a week for the price of one. Years later, Day said that Raine had the biggest effect on her singing style, during her radio performances, Day first caught the attention of Barney Rapp, who was looking for a girl vocalist and asked if Day would like to audition for the job. According to Rapp, he had auditioned about 200 singers when Day got the job, while working for Rapp in 1939, she adopted the stage surname Day, at Rapps suggestion. Rapp felt that Kappelhoff was too long for marquees, and he admired her rendition of the song Day After Day, after working with Rapp, Day worked with bandleaders Jimmy James, Bob Crosby, and Les Brown
6.
Stephen Boyd
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Stephen Boyd was an actor from Glengormley, County Antrim, Northern Ireland. He appeared in some 60 films, most notably as Messala in Ben-Hur and he received his second Golden Globe Award nomination for Billy Roses Jumbo. Boyd was born William Millar in 1931, one of nine siblings, he attended Ballyclare High School. At the age of seven he became known in Belfast for his contributions to the Ulster Radios Children Hour. At the age of sixteen, Boyd quit school and joined the Ulster Group Theater, Boyd learned the behind the scenes tasks of the theater, and eventually worked his way up to character parts and leads, touring both Canada and the United States with stock companies. By the time he was twenty, Boyd had a range of theater experience. In 1952 Boyd moved to London and worked in a cafeteria, Boyd caught his first break as a doorman at the Odeon Theatre. The Leicester Square Cinema across the street recruited him to usher attendees during the British Academy Awards in the early 1950s, during the awards ceremony he was noticed by actor Sir Michael Redgrave, who used his connections to introduce Boyd to the director of the Windsor Repertory Group. Boyds first role which brought him acclaim was as an Irish spy in the movie The Man Who Never Was, the movie was released in 1956. Shortly thereafter he signed a contract with 20th Century Fox, Boyd starred in two Rank productions after this film. Hell in Korea was a role for Boyd, but an interesting movie which featured several renowned actors in early roles, such as Michael Caine. The Beast of Marseilles was a World War II romance set in Nazi-occupied Marseilles with Boyd as the main star, for Twentieth Century Fox, Boyd would be cast in the racially provocative film Island in the Sun, based on the Alec Waugh novel. For Columbia pictures he was cast in the nautical, ship-wreck adventure Abandon Ship. starring Tyrone Power, in early 1957 Brigitte Bardot was given the opportunity to cast her own leading man after her success in Roger Vadims And God Created Woman, and she chose Boyd. Being in the Bardot spotlight added much to Boyds film credit, Boyds first true Hollywood role came as a renegade cowboy in the Fox western The Bravados, which starred Gregory Peck and Joan Collins. It was during the making of film in Mexico in the early part of 1958 that Boyd was finally persuaded to audition for the coveted role of Messala in MGMs upcoming epic Ben-Hur. Many other actors had tried for the role, and Boyd initially wasnt interested, but he eventually signed and began filming in the summer of 1958. Boyd was required to wear contact lenses as Messala, which irritated his eyes. Despite this, Boyd described the experience of Ben-Hur, as the most exciting experience of his life
