Calendar: April 6

A Year: Day to Day Men: 6th of April

Wet and Heated by the Sun

On April 6, 1906 the first drawn animation film is copyrighted by J. Stuart Blackton.

J. Stuart Blackton was an Anglo-American filmmaker, co-founder of the Vitagraph Studios and one of the first to use animation in his films. ”The Enchanted Drawing” in 1900 is considered to be the first film recorded on standard picture film that included some sequences that are sometimes regarded as animation. It shows Blackton doing some “lightning sketches” of a face, cigars, a bottle of wine and a glass. The face changes expression when Blackton pours some wine into the face’s mouth and takes his cigar.

The technique used in this film was basically the substitution splice: the single change to scenes was that a drawing was replaced by a similar drawing with a different facial expression (or a drawn bottle and glass were replaced by real objects). Thus the effect is not considered animation.

Blackton’s 1906 film “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces” is often regarded as the oldest known drawn animation on standard film. He later copyrighted this film on April 6 in 1908. It features a sequence made with blackboard drawings that are changed between frames to show two faces changing expressions and some billowing cigar smoke, as well as two sequences that feature cutout animation.

Blackton’s “The Haunted Hotel” in 1907 featured a combination of live-action with practical special effects and stop-motion animation of objects, a puppet and a model of the haunted hotel. It was the first stop-motion film to receive wide scale appreciation. Especially a large close-up view of a table being set by itself baffled viewers; there were no visible wires or other noticeable well-known tricks. This inspired other filmmakers, including French animator Émile Cohl and Segundo de Chomón, to work with the new technique. De Chomón would release the similar “House of Ghosts” and “El Hotel Electrico” in 1908.

J Stuart Blackton left Vitagraph to go independent in 1917, but returned in 1923 as junior partner to Albert Smith. In 1925, Smith sold the company to Warner Brothers for a comfortable profit. Blackton did quite well with his share until the stock market crash in 1929, which destroyed his savings. He spent his last years on the road, showing his old films and lecturing about the days of silent movies. Blackton died August 13, 1941, a few days after he was hit by a car while crossing the street with his son. At the time of his death he was working for Hal Roach on experiments to improve color process backgrounds.

Calendar: April 5

A Year: Day to Day Men: 5th of April

Just Out of the Pool

On April 5, 1895, Oscar Wilde loses the libel case against the Marquess of Queensbury who accuse him of homosexual practices.

Oscar Wilde’s experience with the English legal system was calamitous given the judicial nature of his oppression. In Wilde’s case, there were three trials. The Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Wilde’s young lover Bosie, had accused Wilde of ‘posing as a sodomite’. The Marquess of Queensbury had chased around London confronting Wilde at his home and elsewhere until the writer was driven to fight back. The form that Wilde’s retaliation took was disastrous for Wilde. He initiated Queensberry’s prosecution for criminal libel but abandoned the case when evidence incriminating him made defeat certain. It was a humiliating reversal and led to his own prosecution.

Wilde’s own performance as a witness was sparkling at first, but then not truthful. He should never have started legal proceedings, but was essentially forced into it. He couldn’t live in peace in England without rebutting Queensberry; but he was unable to rebut him. He was indeed a ‘sodomite’, and pretending to be otherwise to defeat his enemy was bound to end in failure. Trapped whichever way he turned, he chose the path of attack and was floored.

In the second and third trials, Wilde resisted charges of gross indecency. He lied about his relations with rent boys, and pleaded not guilty though he knew that he had broken the law. This led to dishonesty of presentation. The second trial ended inconclusively, the jury unable to decide on Wilde’s guilt; at the third trial the jury showed no such uncertainty and convicted him. Wilde was sentenced to two years’ hard labour, ‘hardly sufficient’, according to the judge, ‘given the seriousness of his crime’.

On his release, he went into exile and wrote nothing else of any real value. During the course of the trials, Wilde was cross-examined about his work. Asked to defend it against a charge of immorality, he insisted that art was without any ethical content. Lying about his intimacy with male prostitutes, he also misrepresented literature’s intimacy with moral discourse. His responses first entertained and then provoked, but did not educate the court; his evidence was not a lesson. It backfired, injuring him rather than the prosecution.

Wilde’s trials point to a certain connection between literary censorship and sexual oppression. Sexuality is a form of self-expression and is thus analogous to literary creativity. One might even say that our sexuality makes artists of us all. As defendant, Wilde was thus doubly, and most inclusively, representative of writers, certainly, but more widely, of everyone whose private life the State attempts to regulate.

Calendar: April 4

A Year: Day to Day Men: 4th of April

Vik in Soapsuds

April 4, 1932 was the birthdate of the American actor and singer, Anthony Perkins.

Anthony Perkins was born in New York City, the son of stage and film actor Osgood Perkins and his wife Janet Esslstyn. He was a descendant of a Mayflower passenger John Howland, who was first an indentured servant and later personal secretary to Governor John Carver of the Plymouth Colony.

Anthony Perkins received a lot of attention for his role in the film “Friendly Persuasion”, playing the son of Gary Cooper under the direction of William Wyler. The film was very successful and he received the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year-Actor and an Academy Award nomination. A life member of the Actors Studio, Perkins also acted in theater. In 1958 he was nominated for Best Actor in a Play for his performance in “Look Homeward, Angel” on Broadway. He played the role of Eugene Gant.

Perkins in youth had a boyish, earnest quality, reminiscent of the young James Stewart, which Alfred Hitchcock exploited and subverted when the actor starred as Norman Bates in the 1960 film “Psycho”. The film was a critical and commercial success, and gained Perkins international fame for his performance as the homicidal owner of the Bates Motel. His performance gained him the Best Actor Award from the International Board of Motion Picture Reviewers. The role and its multiple sequels affected the remainder of his career.

“Not many people know this, but I was in New York rehearsing for a play when the shower scene was filmed in Hollywood. It is rather strange to go through life being identified with this sequence knowing that it was my double. Actually, the first time I saw Psycho and that shower scene was at the studio. I found it really scary. I was just as frightened as anybody else. Working on the picture, though, was one of the happiest filming experiences of my life. We had fun making it – never realizing the impact it would have.” – Anthony Perkins on playing Norman Bates in “Psycho”

Calendar: April 3

A Year: Day to Day Men: 3rd of April

The Railroad Yard

On April 3, 1882, Jesse Woodson James was shot in the back of the head at his home.

After the failed bank robbery of the First National Bank of Northfield, Minnesota, on September 7, 1876, only Jesse and Frank James remained alive and free, escaping to Missouri. Later in 1876 Jesse and Frank surfaced in the Nashville, Tennessee, area using the names Thomas Howard and B.J. Woodson, respectively. Frank seemed to settle down, but Jesse recruited a new gang, leading them on a spree of crimes. A law enforcement posse attacked and killed two of the outlaws but failed to capture the entire gang.

By 1881, with the local Tennessee authorities getting closer, Frank and Jesse James returned to Missouri. James moved his family to Saint Joseph, Missouri, in November 1881, not far from his birthplace. Frank made the decision to head east and settle in Virginia. Both intended to give up crime.

With his gang nearly annihilated, Jesse James trusted only the Ford brothers, Charley and Robert. For protection, he asked the Ford brothers to move in with him and his family. By that time, Robert Ford had already conducted secret negotiations with Missouri Governor Crittenden to bring Jesse in and secure the $5000 bounty reward from the railroad.

On April 3, 1882, after eating breakfast, the Ford brothers and Jesse went into the living room before traveling to a planned robbery. Jesse had learned from a newspaper of one of his gang members who was captured and had confessed to a murder. Jesse was suspicious that the Fords did not mention the news; but he did not confront them. Robert Ford believed that Jesse James had realized the Fords were about to betray him. When Jesse turned his back to them, Robert Ford drew his weapon, and shot the unarmed Jesse James in the back of the head.

The Fords acknowledged their role in Jesse James’ death; Robert wired the governor to claim his reward. The Ford brothers surrendered to the authorities and were dismayed to be charged with first-degree murder. In the course of a single day, the Ford brothers were indicted, pleaded guilty, were sentenced to death by hanging, and were granted a full pardon by Governor Crittenden. The governor’s quick pardon suggested he knew the brothers intended to kill James rather than capture him. The implication that the chief executive of Missouri conspired to kill a private citizen startled the public and added to Jesse James’ notoriety

Suffering from tuberculosis and a morphine addiction, Charley Ford committed suicide on May 6, 1884, in Richmond, Missouri. Bob Ford operated a tent saloon in Creede, Colorado. On June 8, 1892, Edward O’Kelley went to Creede, loaded a double-barrel shotgun, entered Ford’s saloon and said “Hello, Bob,” before shooting Ford in the throat, killing him instantly. O’Kelley was sentenced to life in prison, but his sentence was subsequently commuted because of a 7,000-signature petition in favor of his release. The Governor of Colorado pardoned him on the third of October in 1902.

Calendar: April 2

A Year: Day to Day Men: 2nd of April

The Scarf with Fringe

On April 2, 1513, Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon first sights land in what is now the United States state of Florida.

In September 1493, some 1200 sailors, colonists and soldiers joined Christopher Columbus for his second voyage to the New World. Ponce de León was a member of this expedition, one of two hundred ‘gentlemen volunteers’. The fleet reached the Caribbean in November of 1493, and their primary destination of Hispaniola, now Puerto Rico. In 1504 the appointed governor of Hispaniola, Nicolas de Ovando, assigned Ponce de León to crush the rebellion of the native Tainos people. For this service, he was awarded a land grant and became the frontier governor of the defeated province.

Urged by King Ferdinand of Spain, Ponce de León equipped three ships with at least 200 men at his own expense and set out from Puerto Rico on March 4, 1513 in search for new lands and riches. The fleet crossed open water until April 2, 1513, when they sighted land which Ponce de León believed was another island. He named it la Florida in recognition of the verdant landscape and because it was the Easter season, which the Spaniards called Pascua Florida (Festival of Flowers). The precise location of their landing on the Florida coast has been disputed for many years.

Although Ponce de León is widely credited with the discovery of Florida, he almost certainly was not the first European to reach the peninsula. Spanish slave expeditions had been regularly raiding the Bahamas since 1494 and there is some evidence that one or more of these slavers made it as far as the shores of Florida. Another piece of evidence that others came before Ponce de León is the Cantino Map from 1502, which shows a peninsula near Cuba that looks like Florida’s and includes characteristic place names.

In early 1521, Ponce de León organized a colonizing expedition consisting of some 200 men, including priests, farmers and artisans, 50 horses and other domestic animals, and farming implements carried on two ships. The expedition landed somewhere on the coast of southwest Florida likely in the vicinity of Charlotte Harbor or the Caloosahatchee River. Before the settlement could be established, the colonists were attacked by a large party of native Calusa warriors. Ponce de León was mortally wounded in the skirmish when, historians believe, an arrow poisoned with manchineel sap struck his thigh. The expedition immediately abandoned the colonization attempt and returned to Havana, Cuba, where Ponce de León soon died of his wounds.

Calendar: April 1

A Year: Day to Day Men: 1st of April

Sea Adventure

April 1, 1895 is the birthdate of the American jazz singer and songwriter Alberta Hunter.

In her early teens Alberta Hunter began her singing career in small clubs in Chicago, Illinois. By 1914 she was receiving lessons from the prominent jazz pianist Tony Jackson who helped her expand her repertoire and compose her own songs. One of Hunter’s first notable experiences was singing at the Panama Club, a white-owned club with a white-only clientele. Her act was in the upstairs room where she began her development as an artist in front of a cabaret crowd of patrons. Her big break came when she was booked at Dreamland Cafe, singing with the cornet jazz musician King Oliver and his band.

Alberta Hunter first toured Europe in 1917, performing in Paris and London. Her career as a singer and songwriter flourished in the 1920s and 30s; she appeared in clubs and on stage in musicals both in London and New York. At this time she wrote the critically acclaimed song “Downhearted Blues” (1922). Alberta Hunter recorded prolifically during the 1920s, starting with sessions for Black Swan in 1921, Paramount in 1922-24, Gennett in 1924, Okeh in 1925-26, Victor in 1927 and Columbia in 1929.

In 1928, Hunter played the role of Queenie opposite Paul Robeson in the first London production of “Show Boat” at Drury Lane. She later performed in nightclubs throughout Europe and appeared in 1934 with Jack Jackson’s society orchestra in London. One of Hunter’s most known recordings with Jackson is the famous song “Miss Otis Regrets”. She later moved to New York City, performing with Bricktop, the American female dancer and jazz singer, and recording with Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet.

In the summer of 1976 , Alberta Hunter was connected with Barney Josephson, the legendary owner of the Greenwich Village club, The Cookery. He offered her a limited engagement at the club, which turned into a six year engagement and a revival of her music career after a fifteen year absence from the profession. Impressed by her press reviews, John Hammond signed Hunter to Columbia Records, where she made three albums.

Alberta Hunter was inducted to the Blues hall of Fame in 2011 and the Memphis Music Hall fo Fame in 2015. Her comeback album produced by Columbia Records, “Amtrack Blues”, was honored by the Blues Hall of Fame in 2009.

Calendar: March 31

Year: Day to Day Men: March 31

Changing His Tunes

The thirty-first of March in 1889 marks the official opening date of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The wrought-iron lattice tower was constructed as the centerpiece for the 1889 Paris Exposition, and as a memorial to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the French Revolution.

Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, two senior engineers employed by Alexandre Gustave Eiffel’s company Compagnie des Établissements Eiffel, produced a sketch of a great metal pylon, narrowed as it rose, for the centerpiece of the Paris Exposition. With the assistance of Stephen Sauvestre, the company’s head architect, the men refined the design with the addition of decorative arches at the base of the tower and a glass pavilion on the first level. Gustave Eiffel approved the design and bought the patent rights for their design. This design for the Eiffel Tower was on display at the 1884 Exhibition of Decorative Arts under the company’s name.

On the thirtieth of March in 1885, Gustave Eiffel presented his plans to the Society of Civil Engineers at which time he discussed the technical difficulties and emphasized both the practical and symbolic aspects of the structure. Little progress on a decision was made until Édouard Lockroy was appointed Minister of Trade in 1886. A budget for the Paris Exposition was passed and requirements for the competition being held for the exposition’s centerpiece were altered. All entries were now required to include a study for a three-hundred meter, four-sided tower on the Champ de Mars. A judging commission set up on the twelfth of May found all proposals, except Eiffel’s design, either impractical or lacking in details.

Gustave Eiffel signed the January 1887 contract in his own capacity rather than as a representative of the company. The contract granted him 1.5 million francs toward the construction cost, less than a quarter of the expected cost. Eiffel was to receive all income from the commercial exploitation of the structure during the Paris Exposition and for the following twenty years. To manage the construction, he established a separate company for which he provided half the necessary capital.

The French bank, Crédit Industriel et Commercial, CIC, helped finance the Eiffel Tower’s construction through acquiring funds from predatory loans to the National Bank of Haiti. As a result, the Haitian government was sending nearly half of all taxes collected on its exports to finance the construction of the tower. While the tower was being built as a symbol of France’s freedom, the newly independent Haiti’s economy was hindered in its ability to start schools, hospitals and other basic establishments necessary for an established country.

Work on the Eiffel Tower’s foundations began at the end of January in 1887 with the formation of the four concrete slabs for the legs of the tower. While the east and south legs were easily done; the west and north legs, being closer to the Seine River, needed pilings twenty-two meters deep to support their concrete slabs. All four slabs supported blocks of inclined limestone for the ironwork’s supporting shoes. The foundation structures of the Eiffel Tower were completed at the end of June.

An enormous amount of preparatory work was done for the assemblage of the ironwork. Seventeen hundred general drawings and over thirty-six hundred detailed drawings of the eighteen thousand separate parts were needed. The task of drawing the components was complicate by the complex angles in the design and the degree of precision required; the position of the rivet holes were specified to within one millimeter. No drilling or shaping was done on site; all finished components, some already partially assembled, arrived on horse-drawn carts from the factory. If any part did not fit, it was sent back to the factory. The entire structure was composed of over eighteen thousand pieces joined with two and a half million rivets.

The main structure of the Eiffel Tower was completed at the end of March in 1889. On the thirty-first of March, Gustave Eiffel led a group of government officials and members of the press to the top of the tower. As the lifts were not yet in operation, the ascent by foot took over an hour; most of the party chose to stay at the lower levels. Gustav Eiffel, Émile Nouguier, the head of construction, Jean Compagnon, the City Council president, and the reporters from “Le Figaro” and “Le Monde Illustré” completed the ascent. Eiffel hoisted a large Ticolor flag as a twenty-five gun salute was fired at the first level.

The Eiffel Tower was not opened to the public until the fifteenth of May, nine days after the opening of the Paris Exposition. The lifts, however, were still not completed. Nearly thirty-thousand visitors climbed the seventeen thousand steps to the top before the lifts opened on the twenty-sixth of May. Notable visitors to the tower included inventor Thomas Edison, Edward VII the Prince of Wales, stage actress Sarah Bernhardt and “Buffalo Bill” Cody whose Wild West show was part of the Exposition.

Calendar: March 30

A Year: Day to Day Men: 30th of March

Midnight Vignette

On March 30, 1796, German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss discovers the construction of the heptadecagon.

Carl Friedrich Gauss, the only child of poor parents, was rare among mathematicians in that he was a calculating prodigy, who retained the ability to do elaborate calculations in his head through most of his life. He was recommended by his teachers to the Duke of Brunswick in 1791 who enabled him financially to attend local schools and later to study mathematics at the University of Gottingen, Germany.

Due to his pioneering work, Gauss became the era’s preeminent mathematician, first in the German-speaking world and later became regarded as one of the greatest of all time. Gauss made many contributions to the fields of number theory, geometry, probability theory, geodesy, planetary astronomy, the theory of functions and the theory of electromagnetism.

As the number seventeen is a Fermat prime, the regular heptadecagon is a constructible polygon, that is, one that can be constructed by using a compass and an unmarked straightedge. Carl Friedrich Gauss showed this in 1796 at the age of nineteen. The significance of this lies not in the result but in the proof, which rested on the analysis of the factorization of polynomial equations. This proof represented the first progress in regular polygon construction in over two thousand years.

After Gauss’s death in 1855, the discovery of so many novel ideas among his unpublished papers extended his influence well into the remainder of the century. Acceptance of non-Euclidean geometry came with the almost simultaneous publication of Riemann’s general ideas about geometry, the Italian Eugenio Beltrami’s explicit and rigorous account of non-Euclidean geometry, and Gauss’s private notes and correspondence.

Calendar: March 29

A Year: Day to Day Men: 29th of March

A London Morning

March 29, 1959 was the release date of the film “Some Like It Hot”, directed and produced by Billy Wilder and starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon.

“Some Like It Hot” was shot in California during the summer and autumn of 1958. Many scenes were shot at San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado which fit the look of the movie’s 1920s period and was near Hollywood. The soundtrack created by Adolph Deutsch has an authentic 1920s jazz feel using sharp, brassy strings to create tension.

For the cinematography, Billy Wilder chose to shoot the film in black and white as Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis dressed in full drag costume and make-up looked ‘unacceptably grotesque’ in early color tests. Despite Marilyn Monroe’s contract requiring color film, she agreed to film in black and white after seeing the early color tests of the make-up.

The film is notable for featuring cross dressing, and for playing with the idea of homosexuality, which led to its being produced without approval from the Motion Picture Production Code. The code had been gradually weakening in its scope during the early 1950s, due to increasing social tolerance for previously taboo topics in film, but it was still officially enforced. The overwhelming success of “Some Like It Hot” is considered one of the final nails in the coffin for the Hays Code, the moral guidelines that was in effect from 1930 to 1968.

It was voted as the top comedy film by the American Film Institute on their list ‘AFI’s 100 Years…100 Laughs’ in 2000. In 1989, this film became one of the first twenty-five films inducted into the United States National Film Registry. Though sometimes said to have been “condemned” by the Roman Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency, that body gave the film its less critical rating as “morally objectionable”. In 2017, the BBC conducted an international survey for the best comedy in film history among 253 film critics from 50 countries, which ranked “Some Like It Hot” as number one.

Note: The studio United Artists hired Barbette, a famous female impersonator, to coach Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis on gender illusion for the film. Barbette, whose greatest fame came from his performances in Europe in the 1920’s and 30’s, may have been the inspiration for the 1933 German film, “Viktor und Viktoria”, which features a plot about a woman pretending to be a female impersonator, whose gimmick was removing her wig at the end of her act (Barbette’s signature gesture).

Calendar: March 28

A Year: Day to Day Men: 28th of March

Tightly Stretched in the Sun

On March 28th in 1890, Paul Whiteman was born in Denver, Colorado. Originally a violinist, he became an American bandleader, later known as the King of Jazz for popularizing a musical style during the 1920s and 1930s that contributed to the introduction of jazz to mainstream audiences.

During 1917 and 1918, Whiteman conducted a forty-piece United States Navy band and, after the war, formed the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. In 1920, he moved his popular dance band to New York City where they made recordings for the Victor Talking Machine Company. The popularity of these recordings led to national fame. Whiteman became the most popular band director of that decade. While most bands consisted of six to ten men, his band was more imposing with as many as thirty-five musicians. By 1922, Whiteman was overseeing twenty-eight ensembles on the East Coast and earning over a million dollars a year.

While most musicians and fans considered improvisation essential to the jazz style, Paul Whiteman thought that jazz could be improved by orchestrating the best of it with formal written arrangements. His recordings were popular both commercially and critically; his style was often the first form of jazz most heard during the era. Over the course of his career, Whiteman wrote over three-thousand arrangements.

Whiteman hired the best jazz musicians for his bands; these included such notables as Frankie Trumbauer, Joe Venuti, Steve Brown, Wilbur Hall, Jack Teagarden and Bunny Berigan. He encouraged talented and upcoming African-American musicians and planned to hire many of them; however, his management persuaded him not to do so due to America’s segregation at that time. In 1925, Whiteman hired the team of Bing Crosby and Al Rinker to perform intermittently with his band to break up the selections.

Paul Whiteman provided music for six Broadway shows and produced more than six-hundred phonograph recordings. in 1942, he joined Capitol Records and produced such records as “I Found a New Baby” and “Trav’lin Light” which featured Billie Holiday. Whiteman appeared in the 1945 George Gershwin bio-film “Rhapsody in Blue”, the 1947 Dorsey Brothers bio-film “The Fabulous Dorseys” and as himself in the 1940 “Strike Up the Band”, among others.

After a long and prolific career as a band leader, Whiteman disbanded his orchestra in the early 1940s. He worked as a music director for the ABC Radio Network and hosted several television shows for ABC. The Paul Whiteman’s TV Teen Club from Philadelphia and Grady and Hurst’s 950 Club proved to be the inspiration for WFIL-TV’s afternoon dance show called American Bandstand.

Calendar: March 27

Year: Day to Day Men: March 27

The Slithering Snake

The twenty-seventh of March in 1902 marks the birth date of Charles Bryant Lang Jr., one of the outstanding cinematographers of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Modest and yet a perfectionist, he spent the majority of his career at Paramount Studios where he contributed to its reputation for visual style.

Born in Bluff, Utah, Charles Lang studied law at the University of Southern California, but soon joined his father, photographic technician Charles Bryant Lang Sr., at an East Los Angeles film laboratory in 1918. Lang apprenticed as a laboratory assistant and still photographer before becoming an assistant cameraman. He worked with cinematographers Harry Kinley Martin and Lesley Guy Wilky who often collaborated with William C. DeMille. Quickly promoted, Lang soon worked with William DeMille and, later, followed him to Paramount Studios.

In 1929, Lang became a full director of photography at Paramount Studios. He was part of a team of cinematographers working at the studio that included such craftsmen as Victor Milner, Karl Struss and Lee Garmes. At this time, Paramount dominated the Academy Awards for cinematography, especially in the genre of black and white romantic and period film. The style of lighting that Lang introduced in Fred Borzage’s 1932 “A Farewell to Arms” became heavily identified with all of Paramount’s films during the 1930s and 1940s.

Charles Lang excelled in the use of chiaroscuro, light and shade, and was adept at creating a mood for every genre. His film work in this period included Henry Hathaway’s 1935 drama-fantasy “Peter Ibbetson”. Frank Borzage’s 1936 comedy drama “Desire” with Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper, and Mitchell Leisen’s 1939 screwball comedy “Midnight”, scripted by Billy Wilder and starring Claudette Colbert and Don Ameche. Lang was especially appreciated by female stars, such as Dietrich, Hepburn and Helen Hayes, due to his ability to photograph them to their best advantage, often with subdued lighting and diffusion techniques.

Lang’s lighting effects adapted perfectly to the expressionist neo-realism of the 1950s film noir. His expert techniques strongly contributed to the mood in such films as Billy Wilder’s 1939 “Ace in the Hole” with Kirk Douglas as the exploitive newspaper reporter, and Sydney Boehm’s 1953 crime drama “Big Heat” with Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame. The success of such films as the 1954 “Sabrina” and the 1959 “Some Like It Hot”, all nominees for Lang’s cinematography, owed much of their success to his camera work.

Though he preferred black and white photography, Lang became equally proficient in color photography. He worked with different processes, including Cinerama and VistaVision, on richly-textured and sweeping outdoor westerns such as John Sturges’s 1960 “The Magnificent Seven” and John Ford and Henry Hathaway’s 1962 “How the West Was Won’. Lang also did the cinematography for romantic thrillers such as Stanley Donen’s 1963 romantic mystery “Charade” with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, and William Wyler’s art theft film “How to Steal a Million” with Audrey Hepburn, Peter O’Toole and Charles Boyer.

Charles Lang won an Academy Award Oscar, the second time he received a nomination, for his work on “Farewell to Arms”. He was nominated eighteen times which tied him with cinematographer Leon Shamroy who did most of his work for 20th Century Fox. In 1991, Lang received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographer for a career that included one hundred and fourteen feature films. Charles Lang died in Santa Monica, California in April of 1998 at the age of ninety-six.

Calendar: March 26

Year: Day to Day Men: March 26

Light Casts Shadows

The twenty-sixth of March in 1911 marks the birth date of Tennessee Williams, an American playwright and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of American drama in the twentieth-century.

Born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, Mississippi, Tennessee Williams attended the University of Missouri at Columbia, where he studied journalism. Bored by his classes, he began entering his poetry, essays, stories and plays in writing contests. His first two submitted plays were the 1930 “Beauty is the Word” and the 1932 “Hot Milk at Three in the Morning”. For his 1930 play, which discussed rebellion against religious upbringing, he became the first freshman at the university to receive honorable mention in a writing contest.

After studying a year at St. Louis’s Washington University, Williams transferred in the autumn of 1937 to the University of Iowa where he graduated in 1938 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. He later studied at The New School’s Dramatic Workshop in New York City. In acknowledgement of his Southern accent and roots, Williams adopted the professional name Tennessee Williams in 1939. After working a series of menial jobs, he was awarded a small grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in recognition for his play “Battle of Angels”.

Using these funds, Tennessee Williams relocated to New Orleans in 1939 to write for the Works Progress Administration of the government’s New Deal Program. He lived for a time in New Orlean’s French Quarter, specifically at 722 Toulouse Street, the setting for his 1977 play “Vieux Carré”. Due to his receiving the Rockefeller grant, he was given a six-month contract as a writer for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio.

During the winter of 1944-1945, Williams’s memory play “The Glass Menagerie” based on his short story “Portrait of a Girl in Glass”, was produced in Chicago to good reviews. The play moved to New York City where it became an instant, long-running hit on Broadway. With this success, he traveled widely with his partner Frank Merlo, often spending summers in Europe. For Williams, the constant traveling to different cities stimulated his writing.

Between 1948 and 1959, Tennessee Williams had seven of his plays produced on Broadway: “Summer and Smoke” (1948), “The Rose Tattoo” (1951), “Camino Real” (1953), “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1955), “Orpheus Descending” (1957), “Garden District” (1958), and “Sweet Bird of Youth” (1959). For these, he was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, three New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, three Donaldson Awards, and a Tony Award. All of these plays, except for “Camino Real” and “Garden District”, were adapted into motion pictures. Williams’s 1957 one-act play “Suddenly, Last Summer” was adapted by William and Gore Vidal into the 1959 film of the same name. His play “Night of the Iguana”, which premiered on Broadway in 1961, was later adapted by John Huston and Anthony Veiller into the 1964 film of the same name.

After the successes of the 1940s and 1950s, Williams went through a period of personal turmoil and theatrical failures. Although he continued to write, his work suffered from his increasing alcohol and drug consumption. On the twentieth of September in 1963, Williams’s partner of forty-two years, Frank Merlo, died from inoperable lung cancer. Depressed by the loss as well as the time spent in and out of treatment facilities, he felt increasingly alone despite a short relationship with aspiring writer Robert Carroll. Tennessee Williams was discovered dead at the age of seventy-one in his suite at New York’s Hotel Elysée on the twenty-fifth of February in 1983 from a toxic level of Seconal.

Notes: Beginning in the late 1930s,Tennessee Williams had several short-term relationships with men he met in his travels. In 1948 at the Atlantic House in Provincetown, Massachusetts, he met Italian-American actor Frank Melo who was leaning against the porch railing. According to his memoirs, Williams felt his time with Melo in his Manhattan and Key West homes were some of his happiest and most productive years. However, William’s alcohol, drug use and promiscuity put a strain on their relationship. In 1962 after Melo was diagnosed with lung cancer, Williams move Melo into the Manhattan apartment and stayed by his side until his death in 1963.

Calendar: March 25

Year: Day to Day Men: March 25

Brushstrokes of Light

The twenty-fifth of March in 1939 marks the birth date of Dorothy Catherine Fontana, an American novelist and television script writer and story editor. She is best known for her work on the original “Star Trek” series.

Born in Sussex, New Jersey, Dorothy Catherine Fontana attended New Jersey’s Fairleigh Dickinson University where she graduated with an Associate Degree as an Executive Secretarial major. After graduation, Fontana relocated to New York City where she became junior secretary at the Screen Gems Studios office. She later relocated to Los Angeles where she gained employment at Revue Studios as secretary to Samuel A. Peeples, the scriptwriter for the 1960 television Western “Overland Trail”.

After the series was cancelled, Samuel Peeples and Fontana began work on the 1960 Western series “The Tall Man” for Revue Productions. Fontana wrote the story for episode six “A Bounty for Billy” and episode thirty-three “The Cloudbusters”. She worked with Peeples on “Frontier Circus” and, for producer Nat Holt, on “Shotgun Slade”. All of Fontana’s stories at this time were created under the name of Dorothy C. Fontana.

In 1963, Dorothy Fontana saw an opportunity for a position on NBC’s new Marine Corps series “The Lieutenant”. She began working as a secretary for NBC producer Del Reisman who had previously edited for Rod Sterling’s “The Twilight Zone”. As one of only a few female writes at NBC, Fontana adopted the gender-blind pen name, D. C. Fontana, to prevent her stories from being prejudged. She became secretary for Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the Lieutenant series, who encouraged her writing. As the series came to an end in 1964, Fontana published her first novel “Brazos River” written in collaboration with Harry Sanford.

In mid-1964, Gene Roddenberry began work on “Star Trek”. Encouraged by associate producer Robert H. Justman, Roddenberry assigned Fontana the task of writing the teleplay for an episode he called “The Day Charlie Became God”. She created the script for “Charlie X”, the second episode of the first season, for which she received credit for the teleplay. Fontana wrote episode nineteen of the first season, “Tomorrow is Yesterday”, that became the first “Star Trek” episode solely written by a woman. She also rewrote “This Side of Paradise”, the twenty-fourth episode in which flower spores induce Spock to fall in love. In September of 1966, Fontana was promoted to story editor by Roddenberry and the NBC network.

Dorothy Fontana worked on “Star Trek” through the entire second season as both story editor and rewriter. She was responsible for the ideas behind second season’s episodes “Journey to Babel” and “Friday’s Child”. Instrumental in the rewrite of the 1968 “The Ultimate Computer” episode, Fontana was one of four writers who made initial changes in Harlan Ellison’s “The City on the Edge of Forever”. The script was ultimately rewritten three more times by Roddenberry before it was aired. Fontana left the “Star Trek” team prior to the third season but wrote scripts for it on a freelance basis. Among these were the episodes “The Way to Eden”, “The Enterprise Incident” and “That Which Survives”.

During the 1970s, Fontana took on many roles: scriptwriter, story editor, and associate producer. She wrote the script for Roddenberry’s 1973 “Genesis II” and was both story editor and associate producer on “Star Trek: The Animated Series” which won the 1975 Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Children’s Series. Fontana worked briefly on the 1977 “Fantastic Journey” and wrote for several series including “The Six Million Dollar Man”, “The Waltons”, and “The Streets of San Francisco”. For the first season of “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, she worked as both story editor and associate producer; however, her relationship with Roddenberry became strained so she left the series in May of 1988.

Dorothy Fontana continued to work within the “Star Trek” universe. She wrote the 1989 “Vulcan’s Glory”, a “Star Trek: The Original Series” novel published by Pocket Books. Fontana wrote the “Dax” episode of “Star Trek; Deep Space Nine”, sharing a joint credit with Peter Allan Fields. For the show “Babylon 5”, she wrote “The War Prayer” and “Legacies” episodes for the first season as well as “A Distant Star”, a second season episode that featured her character Neroon. Fontana also created scripts for Bethesda Softworks’s “Star Trek: Legacy” and “Star Trek: Tactical Assault” video games.

A board member of the Writers Guild of America and a twice-inducted member of the American Screenwriters Association Hall of Fame, Dorothy Catherine Fontana died of cancer at the Burbank Hospital in California on the second of December in 2019.

Calendar: March 24

A Year: Day to Day Men: 24th of March

Tensile Strength of Cotton

March 24, 1887 is the birthdate of Roscoe Conkling Arbuckle, an American comedian and film director.

At twenty years of age Roscoe Arbuckle was already a veteran of carnivals, vaudeville, and traveling stock companies, with an act that consisted of jokes, songs, acrobatics, and magic tricks. Weighing between 250 and 300 pounds for most of his adult life, he amazed audiences with his physical prowess and gained a reputation for versatility.

Roscoe Arbuckle was hired by Mack Sennett’s Keystone comedy studio in 1913. Appearing opposite such seasoned clowns as Ford Sterling, Mabel Normand, and Charlie Chaplin, “Fatty” Arbuckle quickly emerged as one of Keystone’s top attractions. From late 1914 onward he wrote and directed virtually all the comedies in which he starred, including such classics as “Fatty and Mabel Adrift” and “He Did and He Didn’t”.

In 1917 Arbuckle took creative control of producer Joseph M. Schenck’s Comique Film Corporation, for which he directed and starred in a series of knockabout two-reelers. During this period he also discovered and nurtured the talents of the young Buster Keaton who costarred in several Arbuckle films. With “The Round Up” in 1920, Arbuckle became the first major comedy star to make the transition from short subjects to feature films. Though most of his subsequent features tended to downplay slapstick in favor of situational humor, his popularity grew unabated.

After completing three films back to back in September 1921, an exhausted Arbuckle attended a weekend party at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. A few days after the drunken festivities, one of the participants, movie starlet Virginia Rappe, died of a ruptured bladder. On the basis of questionable “eyewitness” testimony, Arbuckle was accused of rape and manslaughter by a battery of politically ambitious prosecutors. He also endured a prejudicial “trial by headline,” orchestrated largely by newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. Ultimately, three court trials were held; the first two ended in hung juries, but the third resulted in a full acquittal.

This verdict notwithstanding, Hollywood’s top executives, hoping to deflect attention from other scandals in the motion picture industry, persuaded censorship czar Will Hayes to ban Arbuckle from the screen. Throughout the 1920s and early ’30s, Arbuckle found work as a film director using the pseudonym William Goodrich (his father’s name) and enjoyed modest success in vaudeville and as co-owner of a popular California nightclub. He made an impressive screen comeback in 1932 as the star of a series of Vitaphone two-reel comedies. On the evening of June 29, 1933 after signing a lucrative feature film contract with Warner Brothers, he died in his sleep.

Calendar: March 23

A Year: Day to Day Men: 23rd of March

Blades of Grass

March 23, 1910 was the birthdate of Japanese film director and screenwriter Akira Kurosawa, regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in cinema history.

Kurosawa entered the Japanese film industry in 1936. After years of working on numerous films as an assistant director and scriptwriter, he made his debut as a director during World War II with the popular action film “Sanshiro Sugata”, known as “Judo Saga”. After the war, the critically acclaimed film “Drunken Angel” made in 1948, in which Kurosawa cast then-unknown actor Toshiro Mifune in a starring role, cemented the director’s reputation as one of the most important young filmmakers in Japan.

His film “Rashomon”, which premiered in Tokyo, became the surprise winner of the Golden Lion Award, the highest prize at the 1952 Venice Film Festival. The film’s multiple conflicting eye-witness testimonies, the sound complexity, and the experimental cinematography combined to produce a classic film. The commercial and critical success of that film opened up Western film markets for the first time to the products of the Japanese film industry, which in turn led to international recognition for other Japanese filmmakers.

Kurosawa directed approximately one film per year throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, including a number of highly regarded (and often adapted) films, such as “Ikuro” in 1952, “Seven Samurai” in 1954, and “Yojimbo” in 1961. After the 1960s he became much less prolific; even so, his later work—including his final two epics, “Kagemusha” in 1980 and “Ran” in 1985—continued to win awards, though more often abroad than in Japan. These two epic films, particularly “Ran”, are often considered to be among Kurosawa’s finest works. After the release of “Ran”, Kurosawa would point to it as his best film, a major change of attitude for the director who, when asked which of his works was his best, had always previously answered “my next one”.

Akira Kurosawa wrote the original screenplays “The Sea is Watching” in 1993 and “After the Rain” in 1995. While putting finishing touches on the latter work in 1995, Kurosawa slipped and broke the base of his spine. Following the accident, he would use a wheelchair for the rest of his life, putting an end to any hopes of him directing another film. After his accident, Kurosawa’s health began to deteriorate. While his mind remained sharp and lively, his body was giving up, and for the last half-year of his life, the director was largely confined to bed, listening to music and watching television at home. On September 6, 1998, Kurosawa died of a stroke in Setagaya, Tokyo at the age of 88.

“One thing that distinguishes Akira Kurosawa is that he didn’t make one masterpiece or two masterpieces. He made, you know, eight masterpieces.”- Francis Ford Coppola

“Let me say it simply: Akira Kurosawa was my master, and … the master of so many other filmmakers over the years.”- Martin Scorsese