News

James Houghton, an original cast member of The Young and the Restless and a Daytime Emmy-winning soap opera writer, has passed away at the age of 75.

A Legacy on Screen and Behind the Scenes

Houghton’s wife, Karen Houghton, recently shared the sad news with The Hollywood Reporter, revealing that she had chosen to keep his passing private until now. Houghton died on August 27, 2024, from peritoneal mesothelioma.

Born on November 7, 1948, in Los Angeles, California, Houghton was raised in a show business family. His father, Buck Houghton, was a renowned television producer, best known for his work on The Twilight Zone. It was no surprise that James followed in his father’s footsteps, carving out his own legacy in television.

Rest In Peace

In 1973, when The Young and the Restless first premiered, Houghton was part of its original ensemble, portraying Greg Foster, the ambitious attorney and brother to Jill and Snapper Foster.

James Houghton, known for his role as Kenny Ward on Knots Landing and his work as a writer for The Young and the Restless, died on August 27 at his home in Encino, California. His wife, Karen Houghton, confirmed that he had been battling peritoneal mesothelioma. He was 75.

Houghton played Kenny Ward, a record producer whose troubled marriage was a key storyline in the first four seasons of Knots Landing. The show, which debuted in 1979 as a Dallas spinoff, originally focused on four couples living in a Southern California cul-de-sac. By 1983, his character and his on-screen wife, Ginger (Kim Lankford), were written out, with their departure explained as a move to Nashville.

Before his time on Knots Landing, Houghton played attorney Greg Foster on The Young and the Restless from 1973 to 1976. He later transitioned to writing for the show in 1991, earning four Daytime Emmy Awards as part of the writing team.

James Houghton, who starred as Seaview Circle resident Kenny Ward on the first four seasons of Knots Landing and received four Daytime Emmys as a writer on The Young and the Restless, has died. He was 75.

Houghton died Aug. 27 at his home in Encino of peritoneal mesothelioma, his wife, Karen Houghton, told The Hollywood Reporter. She did not want to discuss his death until now.

Houghton also portrayed the fiancé of Nancy Allen’s character in Robert Zemeckis’ I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978), and he played U.S. senator Cash Cassidy — a bitter rival of Charlton Heston’s oil mogul Jason Colby, on the second season (1986-87) of the ABC primetime soap The Colbys, a spinoff of Dynasty.

Houghton starred as Kenny, a record producer who often fooled around on his wife, Ginger (Kim Lankford), before they had a baby on 66 episodes of CBS’ Knots Landing from 1979-83.

The young...

The Beatles‘ unearthed 2023 single “Now And Then” marked their first new song since 1996, and now, it’s led to the Fab Four’s first Grammy win in 28 years.

At the Premiere Ceremony for the 2025 Grammy Awards, The Beatles won the award for Best Rock Performance for “Now And Then,” beating out songs from Pearl Jam, Idles, The Black Keys, St. Vincent, and Green Day.

Neither surviving members of The Beatles (Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr) were present at the ceremony, so John Lennon’s son Sean Ono Lennon — who won earlier in the evening for Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package for the expanded reissue of his father’s 1973 LP Mind Games — accepted the award on The Beatles’ behalf.

“It’s really incredible… The Beatles have done so much incredible work and they’re still in the culture and people still listen to the music,” Ono Lennon said. “As far as I’m concerned,...

The Los Angeles wildfires may have muted the music business’ usual weeklong celebration leading to the 67th annual Grammy Awards, but maybe that’s served to shine a brighter spotlight on music’s biggest night and its nominated artists? In any case, this year’s competition is (Sasha) fierce! When Beyoncé struts into the Crypto.com Arena on Feb. 2, she does so with the most nominations, 11, including three in the top general categories — album, record and song of the year — a feat shared by Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter (the last two are also up for best new artist). Will Beyoncé finally win album and/or record, two trophies she doesn’t yet have in her case, despite being the winningest artist in Grammy history? Will Swift add a back-to-back Aoty to her collection (this would be her fifth!)? Or will Charli Xcx have everyone seeing lime green?...

Christian Juttner, a child actor in the 1970s who appeared in the films Return From Witch Mountain, I Wanna Hold Your Hand and The Swarm and on several TV shows, has died. He was 60.

Juttner died Nov. 29 of natural causes at his home in Yucca Valley, California, his daughter Aidan Juttner told The Hollywood Reporter.

Return From Witch Mountain, I Wanna Hold Your Hand and The Swarm appeared in theaters within five months of one another in 1978.

He portrayed Dazzler, one of the truants known as the Earthquake Gang, in the sequel Return From Witch Mountain, and in I Wanna Hold Your Hand, the feature directorial debut of Robert Zemeckis, he was the boy with a Beatles-style haircut who is determined to see the Fab Four perform on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964.

And in the Irwin Allen-directed disaster film The Swarm, Juttner portrayed a kid who suffers...

Robert Zemeckis released an R-rated comedy starring Kurt Russell called Used Cars which is surprisingly very dark. Zemeckis is best known for his incredibly popular and classic films such as Forrest Gump, Back to the Future, and Cast Away. Zemeckis made his feature film debut with 1978's historical comedy I Wanna Hold Your Hand, which follows two fans who try to sneak into the Beatles' hotel in New York City before their American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show.

While Zemeckis is known for his collabs with Tom Hanks, he has also worked with several other stars such as Kurt Russell in Used Cars, which was just his second directorial effort. Used Cars is one of Russell's career-best comedic performances, even though the actor is best known for his dramatic roles in classic movies such as Tombstone, Escape From New York, and Miracle. While Zemeckis has made plenty of comedy movies,...

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Beatles '64.

The soundtrack of the Disney+ documentary Beatles '64 features many original songs and covers by The Beatles and classic rock songs performed by their American idols. Directed by David Tedeschi, who edited classic music documentaries such as Rolling Thunder Revue (2019) and George Harrison: Living in the Material World (2011), Beatles '64 showcases the rise of The Beatles during their revolutionary visit to New York City in 1964 on the heels of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The documentary contains rare footage that captures Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr's legendary impact on American music and culture.

While not everyone is a fan of The Beatles, the documentary captures some of their most devoted supporters throughout the decades who remember how the arrival of the British phenomenon in the United States changed their lives forever. Despite the fringe conspiracy theory that Paul faked his own death,...

Chicago – Patrick McDonald of HollywoodChicago.com appears on “The Morning Mess” with Dan Baker for Wbgr-fm on November 27th, reviewing “Beatles ’64,” a new doc on the coming-to-America of the Fab Four. Streaming on Disney+ beginning November 29th.

This is the story of The Beatles’ exquisite timing in coming to America in February of 1964, which they also timed to their first Number One hit in America with “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” Yes, this doc contains archival interviews with John and George, and contemporary interviews with Paul and Ringo, who must be very sick of talking about this all, but the lads still provide some insight. The rest of the story is from background players, with interviews of musicians of the era and social observers, in addition to the Beatlemaniac fans of the era. including many of their ardent females fans in New York City before and after their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show,...

The world needs another Beatles documentary like it needs a live-action remake of “Moana,” but Disney has never met a well it didn’t want to suck dry.

And so, not long after Peter Jackson’s “The Beatles: Get Back” became the must-stream event of Thanksgiving 2021 — a second hyper-restored look back at the band will hit Disney+. This one is called “Beatles ’64,” it’s directed by frequent Martin Scorsese collaborator and “George Harrison: Living in the Material World” editor David Tedeschi (with a technological assist from Jackson’s WingNut Films), and though it’s much shorter than the three-episode miniseries everyone gorged on three years ago, Tedeschi’s 106-minute film operates on much the same principle: It never feels the least bit new or necessary, and yet almost every second of it sparks the joy of a genuine revelation.

Similar to “Get Back,” “Beatles ’64” puts a formative moment from...

In 1965, The Beatles earned their first Grammy nomination for Record of the Year with their hit “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” Now, 60 years later, the Fab Four have once again secured a nomination in the same category, this time for their historic comeback-and-farewell single from last year, “Now and Then.”

That’s right — alongside releases by the likes of Beyoncé, Charli Xcx, Sabrina Carpenter, Kendrick Lamar, and more, The Beatles and their “last song” have been nominated for Record of the Year at the 67th Annual Grammy Awards, which will take place on February 2nd, 2025. It was also nominated for Best Rock Performance.

With these nods, the band now has a career total of 25 competitive Grammy nominations. If they take home the award for Record of the Year, it’ll not only bump up their total number of competitive Grammy wins to eight, but it will (amazingly) mark the very...

A film adaptation of a Broadway musical of a major motion picture? Great Scott! It’s been done before but Robert Zemeckis would really love bringing Back to the Future to the screen — again, this time as a cinematic take on the hit musical. But will he ever get the chance?

While his latest movie Here flounders at the box office, Robert Zemeckis is on the promotional circuit also highlighting some of his greatest hits, including one of his biggest money makers, 1985’s Back to the Future. As far as his plans, inspiration and its status, he noted, “I would like to do the Back to the Future, the musical. Just like [Mel] Brooks did The Producers. I would love to do that. I think that would be great… I floated that out to the folks at Universal. They don’t get it. So, nothing I can do.”

The Back to the Future...

Thought may be the most powerful force in the space-time continuum. As Doctor Emmett L. Brown says in "Back to the Future," the act is the one and only key to guaranteed success: "If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything." This is why any system of control seeks to quell (if not eradicate) free thought as its primary goal because those behind such systems rightfully understand that thought is the biggest threat to their maintaining power. Although governments and censorship boards banning art can be done under a variety of pretenses — this is deemed obscene, that is deemed offensive, and so on — what censoring or outright banning art really does is keep people in line.

Of course, that doesn't mean censorship always makes a ton of sense. Numerous instances of censored or banned art feel absolutely baffling. For instance, did you know that depicting someone head-butting...

“Here” is here.

And Robert Zemeckis’ latest technologically innovative drama stars his “Forrest Gump” team of Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, this time embodying a couple living in a house. The angle of the shot never changes – it’s inside the living of a stately home, as time unfolds (and sometimes bends) around Hanks and Wright’s characters. It’s sort of like Disney’s Carousel of Progress attraction – we watch as their relationships change, time changes, devices change – all from a fixed vantage point.

And as you can imagine, there’s a ton of music. There are hardly better indicators of where we are than what music is playing in the radio or out of somebody’s personal music player.

There’s also one great Zemeckis Easter egg for the fans – at one point, somebody leaves the television on. What’s playing? The Beatles’ monumental performance on Ed Sullivan’s show.

Robert Zemeckis has always been a filmmaker who doubles as a magician. His films are loaded with neat little tricks, and, as is the case with any good magician, you find yourself wondering how he pulled them off. His debut "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" used clever editing, archival footage, and stand-ins to recreate the Beatles' debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. The "Back to the Future" trilogy is bursting with eye-popping special effects. "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" seamlessly blended live-action and animation. "Death Becomes Her" is overloaded with gross-out gags. "Forrest Gump" found fun little ways to insert Tom Hanks into moments of televised American history. The list goes on and on. But at some point, the trickery began to overwhelm the process. His "Beowulf," "The Polar Express," and "A Christmas Carol" embraced heavy motion-capture animation with ghastly, uncanny valley results ("The Polar Express" has somehow become a recurring...

Tom Hanks teamed up once more with Robert Zemeckis, now for the drama movie Here, which will be the project that determines the legacy of their 30-year partnership. Tom Hanks continues to be one of the most popular and beloved actors of his generation thanks to his persona on and off the screen. Although Hanks acting career peaked in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly in the genres of drama and romantic comedies, he has made a bit of everything in over four decades of his career. Of course, Hanks has collaborated with some directors, producers, and actors more than once, among them filmmaker Robert Zemeckis.

Robert Zemeckis career began in the 1970s with short films, with his first feature-length project being the comedy I Wanna Hold Your Hand, in 1978. Zemeckis gained attention when he directed the comedy adventure movie Romancing the Stone in 1984, and ten years later, he worked with...

The Killers kicked off a two-night stand at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, New York, on Saturday night by honoring another band that played the same venue 60 years earlier.

“Some of you might know the history of the place,” Killers frontman Brandon Flowers told the crowd. “Obviously there were some amazing tennis matches that took place here. When we think about that historic Beatles performance at Shea Stadium, that was in 1965. But in 1964, 60 years ago, the Beatles did two nights here at Forest Hills. We thought that we would pay our respects.

This post contains spoilers for the "Back to the Future" trilogy.

Director Robert Zemeckis struggled with creating a successful, financially viable project after helming two films at the onset of his career — 1978's "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and 1980's "Used Cars" — which were produced by his mentor, Steven Spielberg. Despite being backed by such a bankable stalwart in the industry, Zemeckis' films experienced commercial failure time and again, making it difficult for him to land meaningful work during the early 1980s. However, his longtime collaborator, Bob Gale, teamed up with Zemeckis again to pen the script for a time-travel adventure focused on a teenager and an eccentric scientist, which was rejected by several studios at the time, prompting him to seek support from Spielberg's own production company, Amblin Entertainment. Although Spielberg's involvement was minimal compared to past collaborations, the director joined as an executive producer, allowing the project to take off.

Robert Zemeckis couldn't have asked for a more propitious start to his filmmaking career. Soon after graduating from University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts in 1973, Zemeckis, on the strength of his award-winning student film, found a powerful young mentor in Steven Spielberg. The "Jaws" maestro was Universal Pictures' in-house wunderkind, so when he flipped out over "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," a raucous comedy, written by Zemeckis and his creative partner Bob Gale, about a trio of young girls desperate to attend the live taping of The Beatles' first performance on "The Ed Sullivan Show," the studio greenlit it -- even though Zemeckis was completely untested as a feature director.

Five years later, Zemeckis' was very close to finished in Hollywood.

With a budget of $2.8 million, "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" wasn't considered a gamble. And when it lost money for Universal, the studio didn't sweat it. But...

Oscar-winning director Robert Zemeckis developed an interest in film and television at an early age and first worked in his native Chicago as an editor for TV commercials and news programs. This work led him to apply as a transfer student to the University of Southern California film school where his application material included a music video, set to a song by The Beatles. (Not surprisingly his first film would be “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” about a bunch of high school students obsessed with Beatlemania.)

He was initially rejected by USC but he begged an official to reconsider and promised to bring his low grade point average up by attending summer school. This brashness would also play a big part in his initial success as a director when he barged into Steven Spielberg’s office with a copy of his student film and asked Spielberg to employ him. The...

Late musician John Lennon disliked late boxer Muhammad Ali because he made The Beatles “look really stupid”, claims photographer Harry Benson. The band met the boxer on their first trip to the US in February 1964, when they were both on the brink of megastardom, but the meeting reportedly didn’t go well as the legendary fighter — who was still known by his birth name Cassius Clay at the time — insulted the group, leaving them unimpressed.

Photographer Harry Benson had taken the ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ hitmakers to meet Ali — who died in 2016 aged 74 — when he was preparing for his Sonny Liston fight and they were waiting to appear on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

He recalled to the New York Post newspaper’s Page Six column: “Ali dwarfed them. Just the repartee of Ali: ‘You think you’re good-looking? You’re not that good-looking – you’re tiny,...

Romance. Adventure. Bickering. Mudslides. Alligators are ready to devour you at a moment’s notice. This is all at the heart of Romancing the Stone – the movie and the production. Before it became a hit with audiences – which took some time itself – the script was developed by a sole waitress…before landing at the feet of an Oscar winner before bouncing between studios before finding itself the victim of poor press before a miraculous recovery at the box office. With additional backstories of mended feuds, career skyrocketing, and tragic deaths, it reads like something out of a book – not those trashy paperbacks but almost something even more unbelievable: the making of Romancing the Stone.

So let’s find out: Wtf Happened to this movie?!

Romancing the Stone began where so many romances do: a diner! It was while working as a waitress in Malibu, California, in the late ‘70s that...

The concept of time travel, though usually lumped in with science fiction, is actually far closer to fantasy. The notion is rooted in nostalgia, the collective unconscious assumption that there was such a thing as "the good old days." It's also borne out of an interest in history, which as "The Holdovers" so recently and succinctly stated, is really an interest in knowing more about ourselves. While actual time travel will likely never exist, a particular form of it has already existed for over 100 years: cinema.

If poring through film history allows a viewer to ostensibly travel through time, then it only follows that cinema would be a natural tool to examine history and time travel as well. When co-writer and producer Bob Gale hit upon his father's old high school yearbook one day and wondered if he and his father would've been friends (let alone like each other) had...

Fader has released Fader & Friends Vol. 1, a real star-studded covers compilation benefitting charities fighting for transgender rights.

There’s a whole lot in these 44 tracks, but here are just a few notable highlights: CoSign alums Wednesday recorded their rendition of Elliott Smith’s “Christian Brothers,” Rostam covered Lucinda Williams’ “Change the Locks,” Ratboys did The Beatles’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” and NNAMDÏ did The Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.”

While most of the performers on the compilation — including Caroline Rose and Joanna Stenberg, who covered each other — are relative newcomers, the crop of songs constitute a vast timeline. There are covers of Big Thief, Perfume Genius, and Ethel Cain mixed together with songs by Stevie Wonder, Abba, Tina Turner, and Selena. There’s even an old English folk song (courtesy of Helena Deland).

Fader & Friends Vol. 1 will be available exclusively on Bandcamp for the month of November only,...

Many horror fans can recall reading at least one scary short-story collection during their formative years. Especially if they stayed up reading that book in the middle of the night rather than sleeping. These anthologies and omnibuses were designed to send chills down spines in under a few minutes. Some tales took the longer route, but all the same, this once favorite activity at sleepovers and campouts aimed to make you squirm as soon as possible.

This format isn’t as regularly seen these days in children’s horror literature, but a properly spooky short story never goes out of style. The ten classic collections below, ones chiefly from the ’80s and ’90s, are just a few examples of this former trend. And to help demonstrate why they were — and still are — so appealing, a creepy story from each book is highlighted.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (1981)

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark...

Clockwise from bottom left: Misery, Galaxy Quest, Almost Famous, Scream, Bye Bye Birdie (all screenshots via YouTube)Graphic: The A.V. Club

Fandom comes in many forms, whether you’re talking about the different franchises and subgenres of the pop-culture obsessed, or the types of fans themselves and how they choose...

In the 1970s, an ambitious band of young directors that included Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and the late William Friedkin defined the New Hollywood with their idiosyncratic vision that rebelled against the safe and predictable norms of the studio system. Their films were often in response, at least in metaphorical terms, to the zeitgeist, which, as it pertained to the late-'60s and early-'70s, constituted a reaction to political quagmires. Through period or contemporary pieces, New Hollywood grappled with history. One of the essential directors of this era, Steven Spielberg, took on a mentorship role to Robert Zemeckis, a younger and more commercially-drawn up-and-coming filmmaker. Zemeckis, whose populist and crowd-pleasing sentiments contrasted with the downbeat cynicism of New Hollywood, nonetheless captured a blissful cultural moment at the dawn before the wave of political and social upheaval in his 1978 directorial feature debut, I Wanna Hold Your Hand.

With Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness being a box office sensation, excitement over anything related to Marvel’s, uh, supreme wizard has reached a fever pitch. Perhaps the most mystifying thing about Strange is the movies that almost happened.

One of the most curious of these abandoned projects is a script written by Bob Gale. Fresh off of co-creating and co-writing Back to the Future with Robert Zemeckis, Gale’s script did a more than adequate job of bringing Strange to life. The problem — well one of them — was that any attempts to tell Doctor Strange’s story in a way that would respect the character would require a big budget, something that was unlikely in the pre-Batman era.

“When I was in high school, Marvel comics were a huge, huge influence on me,” Gale told us in a 2020 interview, “I read all those great classic comics and stayed with Marvel for many,...

There are few directors who have innovated special effects while advancing the art of populist filmmaking like Robert Zemeckis, the tech-whiz behind the "Back to the Future" trilogy, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," and "Forrest Gump," among other landmark movies from the 1980s and '90s. That may also be why his first two feature-length films — 1978's "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and 1980's "Used Cars" — are often overlooked; on top of being financial duds, they lacked the bells and whistles that would come to define his later work (though not always in a good way). In spite of this, critics were upbeat on both movies...

The post How Romancing The Stone Got Robert Zemeckis Fired From Cocoon appeared first on /Film.

Hollywood has few directors who exude the pure, giddy joy one can find in every beat of a Robert Zemeckis film. From the Beatles-infused start of his career in I Wanna Hold Your Hand to sci-fi (Contact) to horror (What Lies Beneath) to a substance-abuse drama (Flight) to a classical throwback (Allied) to the altogether strange (Welcome to Marwen), Zemeckis has mastered the filmic language of momentum and movement to deliver entertainment of the highest order in virtually every decision he makes. Returning to the world of potions after Death Becomes Her, his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches doesn’t chart bold new territory for the director, but he does brew an entertaining concoction of humor and terror.

While still injecting scares that will haunt any unsuspecting child who tunes in, Zemeckis and co-writers Kenya Barris and Guillermo del Toro’s structure recalls what Nicolas Roeg conjured in his 1990 adaptation,...

One of the most celebrated directors of all time, Robert Zemeckis has had quite the impressive career over the decades. Still making movies over 40 years after the release of his debut film, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, the director has refused to be pigeonholed, trying his hand at almost every conceivable genre, from horror to comedy to computer animation – and everything in between.

Related: The 10 Best Sci-Fi Films Of All Time (According To IMDb)

Although not all of Zemeckis’ films have been critical darlings, he has an impressive batting average nonetheless – helming some of the most inventive, ground-breaking movies ever made. Here are the director’s 10 best movies, ranked according to IMDb.

It’s springtime for Hitler and life is beautiful. At least it is for Johannes “Jojo” Betzler, a 10-year-old German boy who’s been thoroughly indoctrinated by Hitler Youth. That is until he discovers that his mother is hiding a Jewish girl at home and, boom, his world turns upside down.

That’s essentially what happens in “Caging Skies,” a 2008 novel by Christine Leunens that bears some resemblance in plot — but hardly any in tone — to Jojo Rabbit, the polarizing but potently funny film that New Zealand writer-director Taika Waititi has made of it.

Maybe, when you were growing up, you had an imaginary friend. Someone who only you could see, who counseled you and kept you company. It might have been a 10-foot rabbit, or a brown, furry mastodon-like creature, or a boy named Tony who talked to you through your finger. Or maybe, if you’re Jojo Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis), a 10-year-old boy living in Vienna in the final days of World War II, your imaginary best bud is a failed Austrian painter who became radicalized, was appointed chancellor of Germany,...

Last year, I saw the second trailer for Welcome to Marwen, and by the end of its wonderful 2-minute runtime, Marwen was my most anticipated film of the year. By the end of the movie's 114-minute runtime, I had barely made it through my worst experience in a movie theater in a decade. I was not ready to love again. Then I saw the trailer for Yesterday, a high-concept comedy which seemed, like Marwen, to have a bunch of really great ingredients; You have a script by the legendary Richard Curtis of Love, Actually fame, starring a charismatic new actor in Himesh Patel, and a fabulous director in Danny Boyle. All the ingredients promised something great. After the betrayal I had experienced the previous year, I was nervous to risk going through this a second time.

With a tremendous sigh of relief, I can say that Yesterday, while not quite living up to the anticipation,...

Tom Hanks and Gillian Anderson teamed up for a memorable duet!

The duo sang The Beatles‘ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” while on The Late Late Show with James Corden on Tuesday night during a live taping in London.

Anderson, 50, who recently finished playing Margo Channing in the West End adaptation of All About Eve, told host James Corden that one of her fears was singing.

“I don’t sing,” Anderson said. “Pj Harvey wrote a song for me to sing that I had to sing every night, accompanied by a piano, and so I had to sing but I don’t sing.

Arguably the most sturdily crafted and entertainingly anecdotal documentary of its kind since Denny Tedesco’s “The Wrecking Crew,” a similarly nostalgic celebration of artists who generously contributed to the soundtrack of the baby boomer generation, Andrew Slater’s “Echo in the Canyon” offers a richly evocative and star-studded overview of the 1960s Laurel Canyon music scene.

Audiences old enough to have many of the epochal LPs referenced here stashed in their closets will know they’re in good hands right from the start, as the iconic first chords of the Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!” resound during the darkness of the film’s opening moments. But wait, there’s more: The songs of Buffalo Springfield, the Mamas and the Papas, the Beach Boys and other L.A.-based hitmakers of the era are also featured in a doc that shows how music that defined the California Sound of a half-century...

We love them, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Beatles have been such beloved entrenched cultural giants for so long that many a music fan takes them for granted. Likewise, many a cinephile has long ago reached the point of taking Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale and Steven Spielberg for granted. Thus, the recent Criterion Blu-ray release of their 1978 film I Wanna Hold Your Hand hasn’t been met with the level of excitement and anticipation typically heaped upon the first film of a major directorial talent. That director, in this case, is of course Zemeckis, having crafted an impressively manic if sometimes abrasive comedy about four Jersey girls in New York City looking to meet the Beatles during the craziness of their 1964 U.S. visit to...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

On May 14, 2019, Oscar winning director Robert Zemeckis will celebrate his 67th birthday. The director developed an interest in film and television at an early age and first worked in his native Chicago as an editor for TV commercials and news programs. This work led him to apply as a transfer student to the University of Southern California film school where his application material included a music video, set to a song by The Beatles. (Not surprisingly his first film would be “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” about a bunch of high school students obsessed with Beatlemania.)

SEESteven Spielberg movies: All 31 feature films ranked from worst to best

He was initially rejected by USC but he begged an official to reconsider and promised to bring his low grade point average up by attending summer school. This brashness would also play a big part in his initial success as a director when...

In February of 1964, you could see it everywhere you looked — in high school hallways, diners and malt shops, your local record store (definitely in your local record store). It started with a cold sweats and clammy palms; later symptoms also included screaming, swooning, heart palpitations, a burning desire to sing about not wanting to dance with another (wooo) and the inability to control your bladder. It was called Beatlemania, and when the boys from Liverpool with their funny haircuts touched down at JFK airport, the epidemic was just about to hit its zenith.

Manhattan goes nuts as thousands of Beatles fans arrive to celebrate the arrival of the Mop Tops from Liverpool. Experts at wringing manic fun from crazy chaotic farces, Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s first film to hit the screen is still one of their best, due to its brilliant craft and a fresh-faced cast of relative newcomers that deliver old-fashioned enthusiasm and big-time laughs. Not since the Marx Brothers have hotel corridors and backstage shenanigans added up to so much mirth. The image of Beatlemania at full flower is dead-on accurate, and more nostalgic than a bag of Beatle wigs.

I Wanna Hold Your Hand

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 967

1978 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 104 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date March 26, 2019 / 39.95

Starring: Nancy Allen, Bobby Di Cicco, Wendie Jo Sperber, Eddie Deezen, Theresa Saldana, Marc McClure, Susan Kendall Newman, Dick Miller, Christian Juttner, Will Jordan, Vito Carenzo, Newton Arnold,...

Oscar-winning filmmaker Robert Zemeckis has long been fascinated by the fusion of historical fact with inventive fiction — I Wanna Hold Your Hand, 1941, Back to the Future and, of course, Forrest Gump are a few of his past projects that memorably embroidered fictional characters over historical events.

“That’s one of the things that really grabs me is starting with history and extrapolating events from that history,” Zemeckis said. “It makes things interesting to me when it’s all melted together. And that is why I fell in love with the pitch for Project: Blue Book from the very start.”

That pitch led Zemeckis to his executive producer role for the new UFO-themed drama Project: Blue Book, which premieres tonight on History with a story device that puts the shadowy series in the middle-ground that lies somewhere between In Search Of...

Shelf sitters aren’t always bad news in my eyes; take for instance Superstition (1982). This Canadian curiosity was filmed in ’81, released abroad in ’82, and finally washed ashore in North America in early ’85; it is by turns goofy, gory, dumb, and creative in its kills, and is a great addition to a sub-genre I’m just going to call Italiadjacent, where films from this side of the pond look to that side for aesthetical inspiration and end up with nonsensical storylines. And while Superstition tries to keep it together, it can’t help but let loose and summon up its inner Argento from time to time.

Also known as The Witch, Superstition was part of the U.K.’s notorious early ‘80s Video Nasties scene, but landed on the non-prosecutable Section 3 list, which I guess were films still really bad for you, but not “go to jail” bad for renting or selling them.

Same stereotypes, different name.

If you look at the shining beacon of humanity that is Urban Dictionary, you will find fanboy defined as “a passionate fan of various elements of geek culture (e.g. sci-fi, comics, Star Wars, video games, anime, hobbits, Magic: the Gathering, etc.), but who lets his passion override social graces.”

What about fangirl? “A rabid breed of human female who is obsessed with either a fictional character or an actor.”

While the former isn’t exactly an endorsement, the latter is a whole different category of harsh — and might have well been ripped from a newspaper written a hundred years ago. Because despite what this 2009 Today article or this 2012 Time article would suggest, calling women the “new” face of fandom is inaccurate. They’ve been there all along. The movie fangirl stereotype is almost as old as the movies — certainly older than their fanboy counterpart. As described by Diana Anselmo-Sequeira in her...

It’s strange to use the word “under-appreciated” when it comes to the director behind such hits as Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Contact, Cast Away, and Forrest Gump, but in today’s Hollywood it feels like Robert Zemeckis‘ talents are often overlooked. His eye for composition and structure scene-by-scene is remarkable in his recent return to live-action and certainly the case when it comes to his Allied, which is more entertaining than most of its awards-fare brethren.

With the release of his World War II thriller, it’s time to take a look back at his early directorial eye when he was at USC with two short films. The first is 1972’s The Lift, featuring black-and-white photography and a jazzy score as we follow a man’s bout with machinery. Playing with shadows and close-ups in tight quarters, it shows off a 20-year-old Zemeckis’ control of the camera,...

A ripe potboiler, Allied resembles countless World War II motion pictures, yet its intended tone is difficult to discern. Is it meant as a tribute? Or a parody? The answer lies somewhere between the two, obviously, for a movie that includes a childbirth scene -- outdoors, at night -- as London is bombed by the Nazis and an orchestral score soars. The exploding bombs light up the skies like fireworks! The actors look glamorous! How could anyone take that seriously? Director Robert Zemeckis has been mapping the territory between sincerity and cynicism for much of his career. His first two films, I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Used Cars, flopped neatly from one extreme to the other, a pattern that has trailed him for years,...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Robert Zemeckis has, at the very least, had a fascinating career. Starting off with writing 1978’s teen pic “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” he became a Spielberg protege, directing a number of big blockbusters, including one of the most beloved of all time, “Back To The Future.” Then he switched into more prestige-y fare in the 1990s with the Oscar-winning “Forrest Gump” and the less adored, but less stodgy “Contact.” Then he spent the 2000s abandoning reality altogether with a series of performance-capture CGI animations that often felt more like theme park rides than actual movies.

Continue reading Brad Pitt & Marion Cotillard Are ‘Allied’ In Robert Zemeckis’ Engaging, Frustrating WWII Spy Romance [Review] at The Playlist.

Chicago – They were the greatest show on earth, for what it was worth. But what they also were was one of the most fascinating show business stories in history. Director Ron Howard encapsulates John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr during their initial meteoric rise in the descriptively titled ‘The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years.’

Rating: 5.0/5.0

The Beatles history, in ten short years, continues to intrigue and delight rock music scholars and admirers. Ron Howard does a spectacular job of focusing on three crucial years, the years that The Beatles were a traveling road show. Beginning with their conquering of America in February of 1964, through their last organized live concert in San Francisco on August 29th, 1966, the four boys in the band became men, and faced a tsunami of adoration, backlash, surreality and collective joy. This is a love fest by Ron Howard, dedicated...

Actress Theresa Saldana, known for her roles in Raging Bull and The Commish, died Monday in Los Angeles. She was 61.

According to Reuters, Saldana had been hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai, but the cause of death has yet to be disclosed.

While Saldana was famous for her work on screen, the actress was perhaps best known for her advocacy of victims' rights after she survived a near-fatal attack by a stalker in 1982. She founded the Victims for Victims organization that was dedicated to fighting for anti-stalking laws. She then played herself in a film about her attack and advocacy work.

Painful to...

Actress Theresa Saldana, known for her roles in Raging Bull and The Commish, died Monday in Los Angeles. She was 61. According to Reuters, Saldana had been hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai, but the cause of death has yet to be disclosed. While Saldana was famous for her work on screen, the actress was perhaps best known for her advocacy of victims' rights after she survived a near-fatal attack by a stalker in 1982. She founded the Victims for Victims organization that was dedicated to fighting for anti-stalking laws. She then played herself in a film about her attack and advocacy work. Painful to...

Actress Theresa Saldana, known for her roles in Raging Bull and The Commish, died Monday in Los Angeles. She was 61. According to Reuters, Saldana had been hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai, but the cause of death has yet to be disclosed. While Saldana was famous for her work on screen, the actress was perhaps best known for her advocacy of victims' rights after she survived a near-fatal attack by a stalker in 1982. She founded the Victims for Victims organization that was dedicated to fighting for anti-stalking laws. She then played herself in a film about her attack and advocacy work. Painful to...