Eight years after it began, the court battle over the legality of the video cassette recorder (VCR) and its allegedly detrimental effect on the motion-picture industry comes to an end with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling, issued on this day in 1984, in Universal vs. Sony. The case marked the […]
In the pilot episode of the NBC television series The A-Team, which airs on this day in 1983, the go-getting newspaper reporter Amy Allen (Melinda Culea) seeks the help of a mysterious group of Vietnam-veterans-turned-soldiers-for-hire to find her missing colleague in Mexico. An elite commando unit in Vietnam, the so-called […]
On this day in 1982, Vic Morrow and two child actors, Renee Shinn Chen and Myca Dinh Le, are killed in an accident involving a helicopter during filming on the California set of Twilight Zone: The Movie. Morrow, age 53, and the children, ages six and seven, were shooting a […]
Then 34-year-old director Steven Spielberg reportedly drew on his own experiences as an unusually imaginative, often-lonely child of divorce for his science-fiction classic E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, which is released on this day in 1982. For Spielberg, E.T. marked a return to territory he had first visited with the classic Close […]
Hollywood royalty, fashion model, Oscar-winning actress, controversial anti-war activist. Jane Fonda fit all of these descriptions by the late 1970s and 1980s, when she emerged in her latest incarnation–exercise guru. On April 24, 1982, Fonda extended her reach into the home-video market with the release of Workout, the first of […]
The oil tycoon Blake Carrington (John Forsythe) prepares to marry his former secretary, the beautiful and innocent Krystle (Linda Evans), in the three-hour television movie that kicks off the prime-time ABC soap opera Dynasty on this day in 1981. Over the next eight years, the Carringtons, a rich Denver oil […]
“Former Model Named Head of Fox Productions” ran the headline in the January 2, 1980, issue of the New York Times, over an article announcing that Sherry Lansing had been selected to lead the production department at 20th Century Fox. After signing a three-year contract at a minimum of $300,000 […]
On this day in 1978, National Lampoon’s Animal House, a movie spoof about 1960s college fraternities starring John Belushi, opens in U.S. theaters. Produced with an estimated budget of $3 million, Animal House became a huge, multi-million-dollar box-office hit, spawned a slew of cinematic imitations and became part of pop-culture […]
The rise of the action-adventure blockbuster was on the horizon, but on this night in 1978, the small-scale romantic comedy triumphs over the big-budget space extravaganza. At the 50th annual Academy Awards, held at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall won the Oscar for Best […]
In one of history’s most famous cases of body-snatching, two men steal the corpse of the revered film actor Sir Charles Chaplin from a cemetery in the Swiss village of Corsier-sur-Vevey, located in the hills above Lake Geneva, near Lausanne, Switzerland, on this day in 1978. A comic actor who […]
Science-fiction fans and movie buffs in general have cause to celebrate on this day in 1977, when 20th Century Fox releases George Lucas’ space odyssey Star Wars. After Lucas’ second feature film, American Graffiti (1973), became a hit, Fox agreed to put up $9.5 million for the writer-director’s next project. […]
On this day in 1977, the legendary actress Joan Crawford dies of a heart attack in her New York City apartment. Born Lucille Fay Le Sueur (her birth year has been variously recorded as 1904 or 1908), Crawford was a nightclub dancer who broke into Broadway musicals in the Jazz […]
The classic rags-to-riches story got a macho spin in the Oscar-winning Rocky, which was written by its star, Sylvester Stallone, and began filming on this day in 1976. Stallone had his own rags-to-riches tale: Born in the gritty Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City, he was a juvenile delinquent […]
The ominous tones of the now-famous “shark theme” (composed by John Williams and performed by tuba player Tommy Johnson) mark the arrival of Hollywood’s first major summer blockbuster on this day in 1975, when the director Steven Spielberg’s thriller Jaws debuts in U.S. theaters. Based on the best-selling book by […]
On this day in 1975, the Academy Award-winning actress Angelina Jolie (Voight) is born in Los Angeles, California. Jolie’s father, the actor Jon Voight, had been nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for Midnight Cowboy (1969); he won the award for Coming Home (1978). Her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, was also […]
