The Sunshine Boys
The Sunshine Boys is a play by Neil Simon, produced on Broadway in 1972 and adapted for film and television. The play's protagonists are Willie Clark. Lewis and Clark were once a successful vaudevillian comedy duo known as the Sunshine Boys. During the years of their 43-year run, animosity between the partners grew to the point where they ceased to speak with each other. Eleven years prior to the events of the play, Al retired from show business, leaving Willie struggling to keep his career afloat. Willie, now an old man struggling with memory loss, reluctantly accepts an offer from his nephew Ben, a talent agent, to reunite with Al for a CBS special on the history of comedy. Willie and Al meet in Willie's apartment to rehearse their classic tax collector sketch; the reunion gets off to a bad start, with the two getting into heated arguments over various aspects of the performance. However, thanks to the urging of Al's daughter, the two decide to go through with the performance. Willie and Al's dress rehearsal at CBS' studio ends badly.
Willie is enraged when Al repeats his old habits of poking his chest and accidentally spitting on his face. As Al walks off the stage in regret, Willie has a heart attack as a result of his agitated state. Two weeks Willie is recovering under the care of a nurse. Upon Ben's recommendation, he decides to move into an actors' retirement home in New Jersey. Al, concerned about Willie's well-being, makes a visit; when the two talk, it is revealed. Neil Simon was inspired by two venerable vaudeville teams; the longevity of "Lewis and Clark" was inspired by Smith and Dale who, unlike their theatrical counterparts, were inseparable lifelong friends. The undercurrent of backstage hostility between "Lewis and Clark" was inspired by the team of Gallagher and Shean, who were successful professionally but argumentative personally. Other sources say this is based on Fields; the Sunshine Boys premiered on Broadway at the Broadhurst Theatre on December 20, 1972, transferred to the Shubert Theatre and the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, closing on April 21, 1974, after 538 performances.
Produced by Emanuel Azenberg and directed by Alan Arkin, the original cast featured Sam Levene as Lewis, Jack Albertson as Clark, Lewis J. Stadlen as Ben. Replacements in the run included Lou Jacobi as Lewis and Jack Gilford as Clark. Tony Award nominations went to Simon and Arkin, Albertson won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance; the play was revived on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre, opening on December 8, 1997 and closing on June 28, 1998 after 230 performances. Directed by John Tillinger, the cast starred Jack Klugman as Willie Clark and Tony Randall as Al Lewis. A West End production of the play, starring Danny DeVito ) and Richard Griffiths, opened on 17 May 2012 and played a limited 12-week season until 28 July; the blog A Cultured Lad gave it a full five-star rating, adding, "Productions like this don’t come often. This show glitters, like fireworks on the fourth of July. Wonderful." Theatre critic Charles Spencer gave the show a positive review, with a four star rating and said that "Thea Sharrock directs a pitch-perfect production that beautifully captures fleeting moments of tenderness in the comedy without turning mushy."
The production was scheduled for a run in Los Angeles. DeVito's former Taxi co-star Judd Hirsch stepped into the role of Lewis, the show opened September 24, 2013 at the Ahmanson Theatre. Danny DeVito – Willie Clark Richard Griffiths – Al Lewis Adam Levy – Ben Silverman William Maxwell – Patient & Understudy Willie Peter Cadden – Voice of TV Director & Understudy Al and Patient Nick Blakeley – Eddie & Understudy Ben Rebbeca Blackstone – Miss MacKintosh Johnnie Fiori – Registered Nurse Oliver Stoney – Understudy Eddie & TV Director Clementine Marlowe-Hunt – Miss MacKintosh & Registered Nurse The 1975 feature film Stars George Burns as Lewis and Walter Matthau as Clark. Burns won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance.1977 TV pilot Stars Lionel Stander as Lewis and Red Buttons as Clark. The pilot was not picked up for a series, but was broadcast by NBC on June 9, 1977; the 1996 TV movie Stars Woody Allen as Peter Falk as Clark. Neil Simon adapted his play for Hallmark Entertainment.
Directed by John Erman, it was not broadcast until December 28, 1997. Other performers include Michael McKean, Liev Schreiber, Edie Falco, Sarah Jessica Parker, Whoopi Goldberg in supporting roles. Simon's teleplay updated the setting and made the two comedians the product of the early days of television, the medium in which the playwright got his start. Unlike the film adaptation, although they are portrayed as cantankerous, their animosity was not as severe as Matthau's and Burns' characters' bad relationship. There have been three German television versions of all entitled Sonny Boys; the 1982 adaptation features Carl-Heinz Schroth and Johannes Heesters The 1995 version features Harald Juhnke and Wolfgang Spier The 2001 version features Werner Schneyder and Dieter Hildebrandt A Dutch stage adaptation ran in 2015–2016, starring Kees Hulst and comedian Andre van Duin. West End Play website The Sunshine Boys at the Internet Broadway Database The Sunshine Boys on IMDb Sonny Boys on IMDb Sonny Boys on IMDb Sonny Boys on IMDb
Petulia
Petulia is a 1968 American drama film directed by Richard Lester. The screenplay by Lawrence B. Marcus is based on the novel Me and the Arch Kook Petulia by John Haase, it was scored by John Barry. Petulia Danner is a young San Francisco socialite married to David. At a benefit concert for victims of traffic accidents, she meets Dr. Archie Bollen, with whom she became smitten as he treated an injured Mexican boy. Archie is in the process of divorcing his wife Polo, sifting through relationships with the new man in his ex's life, his estranged sons, well-to-do friends who only know Archie as one-half of a couple. Petulia and Archie embark on a quirky and tragic affair. Filmed on location throughout San Francisco, Petulia included scenes at the apartment building located at 307 Filbert Street, the Cala Foods on Hyde, in the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel where, amongst other things, Janis Joplin was filmed lip-synching to a pre-recording in May, 1967. Petulia had been listed to compete at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, but the festival was cancelled due to the events of May 1968 in France.
Giving the film his highest rating, four stars of a possible four, Roger Ebert wrote in his Chicago Sun-Times review of 1 July 1968: "Richard Lester's Petulia made me unhappy, yet I am unable to find a single thing wrong with it." Both Marcus and Turner were nominated for the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written American Drama. Lester utilises the current west coast musicians of the time Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Grateful Dead playing "Viola Lee Blues", The Committee, Ace Trucking Company are featured in club sequences. Grateful Dead members Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, Bill Kreutzmann appear in cameos during the movie's apartment house medical emergency scene as onlookers. Jerry Garcia appears in duplicate on a large mural and in triplicate on a bus bench both times in stylized solid black and white. Petulia was an influence on filmmaker Steven Soderbergh; the film was released on VHS. A US DVD was released in 2006.
Petulia on IMDb Petulia at Rotten Tomatoes
Disco
Disco is a music genre and subculture that emerged in the 1970s from the United States' urban nightlife scene. The music, the fashion, many song lyrics and other cultural phenomena associated with disco were focused on having a good time on the dance floor of a discotheque to the loud sounds of records being played by a DJ enhanced by coloured lighting effects. Disco started as a mixture of music from venues popular with African Americans and Latino Americans, Italian Americans, LGBT people, psychedelic hippies in Philadelphia and New York City during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Disco can be seen as a reaction to both the dominance of rock music and the stigmatization of dance music by the counterculture during this period. Several dance styles were developed during the period of disco's popularity in the United States, including the Bump and the Hustle; the disco sound is typified by "four-on-the-floor" beats, syncopated basslines, string sections, electric piano and electric rhythm guitars.
Lead guitar features less in disco than in rock. Well-known disco artists include Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, the Bee Gees, Chic, KC and the Sunshine Band, Thelma Houston and the Village People. While performers and singers garnered public attention, record producers working behind the scenes played an important role in developing the genre. Films such as Saturday Night Fever and Thank God It's Friday contributed to disco's mainstream popularity. By the late 1970s, most major U. S. cities had thriving disco club scenes, DJs would mix dance records at clubs such as Studio 54 in New York City, a venue popular among celebrities. Discothèque-goers wore expensive and sexy fashions. There was a thriving drug subculture in the disco scene for drugs that would enhance the experience of dancing to the loud music and the flashing lights, such as cocaine and Quaaludes, the latter being so common in disco subculture that they were nicknamed "disco biscuits". Disco clubs were associated with promiscuity as a reflection of the sexual revolution of this era in popular history.
Disco was the last popular music movement driven by the baby boom generation. It began to decline in the United States during 1979-80, by 1982 it had lost nearly all popularity there. Disco Demolition Night, an anti-disco protest held in Chicago on July 12, 1979, remains the most well-known of several "backlash" incidents across the country that symbolized disco's declining fortune. Disco was a key influence in the development of electronic dance house music, it has had several revivals, such as Madonna's successful 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor, again in the 2010s, entering the pop charts in the US and the UK. The term "disco" is shorthand for the word discothèque, a French word for "library of phonograph records" derived from "bibliothèque"; the word "discothèque" was current in the same meaning in English in the 1950s."Discothèque" became in use in French as a term for a type of nightclubs in Paris after these had resorted to playing records during the Nazi occupation in the early 1940s.
Some clubs used it as their proper name. In 1960 it was used to describe a Parisian nightclub in an English magazine. In the summer of 1964 a short sleeveless dress called "discotheque dress" was popular in the United States for a short time; the earliest known use for the abbreviated form "disco" described this dress and has been found in the Salt Lake Tribune of 12 July 1964, but Playboy magazine used it soon after to describe Los Angeles nightclubs in September of the same year. Vince Aletti was one of the first to describe disco as a music genre, he wrote the feature article "Discoteque Rock Paaaaarty" that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in September 1973. The music layered soaring, often-reverberated vocals doubled by horns, over a background "pad" of electric pianos and "chicken-scratch" rhythm guitars played on an electric guitar. "The'chicken scratch' sound is achieved by pressing the strings against the fretboard and quickly releasing them just enough to get a muted scratching while strumming close to the bridge."
Other backing keyboard instruments include the piano, electric organ, string synth, electromechanical keyboards such as the Fender Rhodes electric piano, Wurlitzer electric piano, Hohner Clavinet. Synthesizers are fairly common in disco in the late 1970s; the rhythm is laid down by prominent, syncopated basslines played on the bass guitar and by drummers using a drum kit, African/Latin percussion, electronic drums such as Simmons and Roland drum modules. The sound was enriched with solo lines and harmony parts played by a variety of orchestral instruments, such as harp, viola, trumpet, trombone, flugelhorn, French horn, English horn, flute, piccolo and synth strings, string section or a full string orchestra. Most disco songs have a steady four-on-the-floor beat, a quaver or semi-quaver hi-hat pattern with an open hi-hat on the off-beat, a heavy, syncopated bass line. Other Latin rhythms such as the rhumba, the samba and the cha-cha-cha are found in disco recordings, Latin polyrhythms, such as a rhumba beat layered over a merengue, are commonplace.
The quaver pattern is supported by other instruments such as the rhythm guitar and may be implied rather than explicitly present. Songs use syncopation, the accenting of unexpected beats. In general, the d
Improvisational theatre
Improvisational theatre called improvisation or improv, is the form of theatre comedy, in which most or all of what is performed is unplanned or unscripted: created spontaneously by the performers. In its purest form, the dialogue, action and characters are created collaboratively by the players as the improvisation unfolds in present time, without use of an prepared, written script. Improvisational theatre exists in performance as a range of styles of improvisational comedy as well as some non-comedic theatrical performances, it is sometimes used in film and television, both to develop characters and scripts and as part of the final product. Improvisational techniques are used extensively in drama programs to train actors for stage and television and can be an important part of the rehearsal process. However, the skills and processes of improvisation are used outside the context of performing arts - Applied Improvisation, it is used in classrooms as an educational tool and in businesses as a way to develop communication skills, creative problem solving, supportive team-work abilities that are used by improvisational, ensemble players.
It is sometimes used in psychotherapy as a tool to gain insight into a person's thoughts and relationships. The earliest well documented use of improvisational theatre in Western history is found in the Atellan Farce of 391 BC. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, commedia dell'arte performers improvised based on a broad outline in the streets of Italy. In the 1890s, theatrical theorists and directors such as the Russian Konstantin Stanislavski and the French Jacques Copeau, founders of two major streams of acting theory, both utilized improvisation in acting training and rehearsal. Modern theatrical improvisation games began as drama exercises for children, which were a staple of drama education in the early 20th century thanks in part to the progressive education movement initiated by John Dewey in 1916; some people credit American Dudley Riggs as the first vaudevillian to use audience suggestions to create improvised sketches on stage. Improvisation exercises were developed further by Viola Spolin in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, codified in her book Improvisation For The Theater, the first book that gave specific techniques for learning to do and teach improvisational theater.
In the 1970s in Canada, British playwright and director Keith Johnstone wrote Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, a book outlining his ideas on improvisation, invented Theatresports, which has become a staple of modern improvisational comedy and is the inspiration for the popular television show Whose Line Is It Anyway? Spolin influenced the first generation of modern American improvisers at The Compass Players in Chicago, which led to The Second City, her son, Paul Sills, along with David Shepherd, started The Compass Players. Following the demise of the Compass Players, Paul Sills began The Second City, they were the first organized troupes in Chicago, the modern Chicago improvisational comedy movement grew from their success. Many of the current "rules" of comedic improv were first formalized in Chicago in the late 1950s and early 1960s among The Compass Players troupe, directed by Paul Sills. From most accounts, David Shepherd provided the philosophical vision of the Compass Players, while Elaine May was central to the development of the premises for its improvisations.
Mike Nichols, Ted Flicker, Del Close were her most frequent collaborators in this regard. When The Second City opened its doors on December 16, 1959, directed by Paul Sills, his mother Viola Spolin began training new improvisers through a series of classes and exercises which became the cornerstone of modern improv training. By the mid-1960s, Viola Spolin's classes were handed over to her protégé, Jo Forsberg, who further developed Spolin's methods into a one-year course, which became The Players Workshop, the first official school of improvisation in the USA. During this time, Forsberg trained many of the performers who went on to star on The Second City stage. Many of the original cast of Saturday Night Live came from The Second City, the franchise has produced such comedy stars as Mike Myers, Tina Fey, Bob Odenkirk, Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert, Eugene Levy, Jack McBrayer, Steve Carell, Chris Farley, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi. Keith Johnstone's group The Theatre Machine, which originated in London, was touring Europe.
This work gave birth to Theatresports, at first secretly in Johnstone's workshops, in public when he moved to Canada. Toronto has been home to a rich improv tradition. In 1984, Dick Chudnow founded ComedySportz in Milwaukee, WI. Expansion began with the addition of ComedySportz-Madison, in 1985; the first Comedy League of America National Tournament was held in 1988, with 10 teams participating. The league boasts a roster of 29 international cities. In San Francisco, The Committee theater was active in North Beach during the 1960s, it was founded by Alan Myerson and his wife Jessica. When The Committee disbanded in 1972, three major companies were formed: The Pitchell Players, The Wing, Improvisation Inc; the only company that continued to perform Close's Harold was the latter one. Its two former members, Michael Bossier and John Elk, formed Spaghetti Jam in San Francisco's Old Spaghetti Factory in 1976, where shortform improv and Harolds were performed through 1983. Stand-up comedians performing down the street at the Intersection for the Arts would drop by and sit in.
In 1979, Elk brought shortform to England, teaching workshops at Jacksons Lane Theatre, he was the first American to perform at The Comedy Store, above
Dragnet (franchise)
Dragnet is an American radio and motion-picture series, enacting the cases of a dedicated Los Angeles police detective, Sergeant Joe Friday, his partners. The show takes its name from the police term "dragnet", meaning a system of coordinated measures for apprehending criminals or suspects. Dragnet is the most famous and influential police procedural drama in media history; the series gave audience members a feel for the heroism of police work. Dragnet earned praise for improving the public opinion of police officers. Actor and producer Jack Webb's aims in Dragnet were for realism and unpretentious acting; the show's cultural impact is such that after seven decades after its debut, elements of Dragnet are familiar to those who have never seen or heard the program: The ominous, four-note introduction to the brass and timpani theme music is recognizable. Another Dragnet trademark is the show's opening narration: "Ladies and gentlemen: the story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent."
This underwent minor revisions over time. The "only" and "ladies and gentlemen" were dropped at some point, for the television version "hear" was changed to "see". Variations on this narration have been featured in subsequent crime dramas, in parodies of the dramas. Dragnet began as a radio series. Webb relaunched Dragnet in 1966, with NBC once again chosen to air the series, he tried to persuade Ben Alexander to rejoin him as Frank Smith. Alexander was committed to an ABC police series, Felony Squad, the producers would not release him. Webb reluctantly came up with a new character to take the role of Joe Friday's partner, calling upon his longtime friend Harry Morgan to play Officer Bill Gannon. Morgan had portrayed rooming-house proprietor Luther Gage in the 1949 radio series episode "James Vickers". George Fenneman returned as the show's primary announcer, with John Stephenson replacing Hal Gibney in the role of announcing the trial dates and subsequent punishments for the offenders. Fenneman replaced Stephenson in that role during the fourth season.
Unlike the previous Dragnet series, the revival was aired in color. Webb produced a TV movie pilot for the new version of the show for Universal Television, although the pilot was not aired until January 1969. NBC bought the show on the strength of the movie, it debuted as a midseason replacement for the sitcom The Hero on Thursday nights in January 1967. To distinguish it from the original, the year was included in the title of the show. Although Friday had been promoted to lieutenant in the final episode of the 1950s production, Webb chose to have Friday revert to sergeant with his familiar badge, "714"; when real-life LAPD Sergeant Dan Cooke, Webb's contact in the department during production of the revived Dragnet series, was promoted to lieutenant, he arranged to carry the same lieutenant's badge, number 714, as worn by Joe Friday. Cooke was technical advisor to the KNBC documentary Police Unit 2A-26, directed by John Orland, he brought that to the attention of Webb, who hired Orland to direct and film This is the City, a series of minidocumentaries about Los Angeles that preceded most TV episodes during the 1969 and 1970 seasons.
The show had good ratings on NBC's schedule for four seasons, although its popularity did not exceed that of the 1950s version. Much as was done 11 years earlier, Webb decided voluntarily to discontinue Dragnet after its fourth season to focus on producing and directing his other projects through Mark VII Limited; the first of these projects was a spinoff of Dragnet titled Adam-12, a 30-minute police procedural like its parent series, but focusing on patrol officers rather than detectives. The series premiered in the fall of 1968 and ran for seven seasons, coming to an end in 1975. Adam-12, in turn, spawned its own spinoff in early 1972 called Emergency!. Reruns of this version were popular on local stations during the late afternoons or early evenings, in the early 1970s. From 1991 to 95 they aired on Nick at Nite moved to sister cable channel TV Land. From October 1, 2011, to April 26, 2013, the series ran daily on digital cable channel Antenna TV, before that, the show aired on Retro Television Network.
Dragnet aired Monday through Friday on Me-TV. The show was part of the "CriMe TV" morning block with Perry Mason and The Rockford Files, with Dragnet airing back to back from 11:00 am until 12:00 pm. In December 2014, Me-TV added a third airing of Dragnet to its late-night lineup. Me-TV ended the run of Dragnet on January 1, 2015, whereupon it became part of Cozi TV's regular lineup. Webb had begun working on a revival of Dragnet in 1982, writing and producing five scripts and keeping his role as Joe Friday. Once again he needed to create a new character for Friday's partner. Webb decided on Kent McCord, the former Adam-12 star who had several guest appearances early in the 1967 revival series, to fill the undefined role.
Bonnie Franklin
Bonnie Gail Franklin was an American actress, known for her leading role in the television series One Day at a Time. She was nominated for Emmy and Golden Globe Awards. Franklin was born in Santa Monica, the daughter of Claire who outlived her and Samuel Benjamin Franklin, an investment banker who founded the Beverly Hills chapter of B'nai B'rith, her parents were both her father from Russia and her mother from Romania. Her family moved to Beverly Hills when she was 13 years old, she graduated from Beverly Hills High School in 1961, she attended Smith College. She moved back to California to attend UCLA, earned a bachelor's degree in English in 1966. Franklin first appeared on television at age 9 in The Colgate Comedy Hour; as a small child, she appeared in a non-credited role in the Alfred Hitchcock film The Wrong Man. In the 1960s, she portrayed a teenage feature character in "You're the Judge," a short educational film about baking sponsored by Procter & Gamble and featuring the use of Crisco.
She debuted on Broadway in 1970 in the musical Applause. Her recording of "Applause", the show's title track, was the most successful Broadway song of the season, vocally upstaging the star of the show, Lauren Bacall. Although she was on stage for only a fraction of the running time of that show, Franklin attracted a lot of attention. In its July 1970 edition, for example, Vogue published a photo spread in which the magazine predicted big careers for three young women: Melba Moore, Sandy Duncan, Franklin. Franklin appeared at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey in both George M! and A Thousand Clowns. From June 22 through September 2, 1973, she appeared as Carrie Pepperidge in a production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Carousel" at the Jones Beach Theater on Long Island in New York in a cast that included John Cullum and Barbara Meister, she guest-starred on several television series, including The Man from U. N. C. L. E. and Hazel. She had a semi-regular role in the ABC series Gidget.
She directed several episodes of the 1980s sitcom Charles in Charge and the syndicated comedy series The Munsters Today. Franklin was best known for her portrayal of divorced mother Ann Romano on the television situation comedy One Day at a Time. In April 2011, Franklin and other cast members from One Day at a Time accepted the "Innovators Award" from the TV Land cable channel—one of several awards in the annual event; the citation on the TV Land web site reads: the Innovator Award...is given to a television series that carved out new territory, tackled important issues of its day and helped re-defined its genre. The series One Day at a Time was a hybrid drama/comedy, addressed such taboo topics as pre-marital sex, sexual harassment and more, breaking barriers and paving the way for future shows to tackle these issues as well. Developed and written in part by TV visionary Norman Lear, One Day At A Time aired on CBS for nine seasons from 1975–1984. Starring Bonnie Franklin, Valerie Bertinelli and Mackenzie Phillips as Ann Romano, Barbara Cooper and Julie Cooper, the series revolved around a family headed by a single mother that relocates to Indianapolis, where their new apartment building super, Dwayne Schneider, befriends them.
Taking part in the cast reunion is Glenn Scarpelli, who joined the series in 1980 as the son of Ann's boyfriend, Nick. A Democrat, she supported Walter Mondale's campaign in the 1984 presidential election. In 1988, Franklin appeared at the Bucks County Playhouse and at the Pocono Playhouse, both in Pennsylvania, in the title role of Annie Get Your Gun. In 1988, she appeared with Tony Musante at the Westside Arts Theatre in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune by Terrence McNally, she performed in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Pittsburgh Public Theater. In 1997, she appeared at Ford's Theatre, Washington, D. C. in All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. In 2005, she appeared with Bruce Weitz at the New Theatre Restaurant in Overland Park, Kansas in 2 Across, she played "Ouiser" in a production of Steel Magnolias at the Rubicon Theater, California. In the mid and late 2000s, Franklin appeared in nearly a dozen staged readings in the Greater Los Angeles area with Classic and Contemporary American Playwrights, which she founded in 2001 with her sister Judy.
During the 2006–2007 season, she appeared in the drama Toys in the Attic, written by Lillian Hellman. She appeared in Neil Simon's Broadway Bound at the Pico Playhouse in January 2008. In 2005, she was reunited with her One Day at a Time co-stars Mackenzie Phillips, Valerie Bertinelli and Pat Harrington for the 60-minute CBS TV special retrospective The One Day at a Time Reunion. In 2011, she was reunited once again with Bertinelli on Hot in Cleveland, playing the mother of Bertinelli's character's boyfriend. On April 28, 2012, she was among several stars who appeared at the 28th annual Southland Theatre Artists Goodwill Event benefit, titled Original Cast 3, at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills to benefit AIDS Project Los Angeles; the event raised more than $200,000 for APLA's work with clients living with HIV and AIDS in Los Angeles County. Franklin and other original-cast members from a variety of musicals performed songs with which they are associated. Franklin sang the title song from Applause, which she had intr
Some Kind of a Nut
Some Kind of a Nut is a 1969 American comedy film written and directed by Garson Kanin and starring Dick Van Dyke, Angie Dickinson and Rosemary Forsyth. Fred Amidon is a New York City bank teller. Fred has a new fiancée, bank colleague Pamela Anders, with whom he is about to embark on a vacation. While on a picnic in the park, Fred is stung on the chin by a bee; because it hurts him to shave, Fred lets a full beard grow. He is surprised when his boss orders him to shave. Pamela doesn't care for the beard, but Fred is tired of always conforming to everyone else's desires and demands, he is fired. Colleagues come to Fred's defense; the male ones grow beards in support. Co-workers go on strike and carry picket signs outside the bank, soon joined by hippies and jazz musicians with beards. Fred becomes an overnight media sensation. Rachel likes the new Fred's fortitude. Pamela does not, she has her brothers shave him. Fred wakes up with their work half-finished, he flees on foot, wearing half underwear and shoes.
Police place him in a psychiatric ward. Rachel rescues him, they reconcile and Fred shaves the beard, which he never intended to keep; some Kind of a Nut on IMDb Some Kind of a Nut at the TCM Movie Database
.jpg)
