Showbiz History: Traffic, Show Boat, and Gérard Depardieu
Sunday, December 27, 2020 at 10:00AM 7 random things that happened on this day, December 27th, in showbiz history
1927 Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's "Show Boat" opens on Broadway. It will utterly change the musical artform linking plot and characters and song in a way that had never been done. Plus it has truly amazing songs. Here's a good 5 minute overview of how revolutionary it was. It's had three film versions but honestly it seems ripe for a remake given today's much more evolved takes on race relations and appropriate casting processes. In short Hollywood is always remaking the wrong projects and ignoring famous but non-definitively made titles that are perfect for redos...
1970 Hello Dolly closed on Broadway after a nearly seven year run, which was a very long run back then (it was only in the late 1980s when Broadway and business changed such that successful shows could run for decade after decade.) Ethel Merman was playing Dolly at the time. They had almost exclusively used major stars to keep the show running on the Great White Way after Carol Channing left to begin the national tour, including movie stars Betty Grable and Ginger Rogers and entertainers like Phillis Dyller and Pearl Bailey. The classic stage musical had become a film a year prior to the Broadway closing.
Joan Van Ark, Patrick Duffy, Ted Shackleford and Michele Lee in the pilot episode
1979 Knots Landing, the hit spin off of Dallas, premieres on CBS and will run for the 14 years (!). The 1980s were the heyday of the primetime soap opera with Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest, and Knots Landing the most successful among many series of the kind.
1995 Timothée Chalamet is born. Happy 25th Timothée! (More on him later today)
2000 Traffic opens in limited release. It will be Steven Sodebergh's second hit that year (just under the wire) resulting in a rare double nod in Best Director alongside his earlier film Erin Brockovich. Brockovich is a better film but because it is female-fronted and fun, it was less respected at the time (we don't make or like these rules but this is the patriarchy in action) and Traffic took the Best Director statue at the Oscars.
2002 Chicago hits movie theaters in limited release. We had a ton of fun discussing it this summer on the podcast/Smackdown.
2016 The late great Carrie Fisher passed away. She is so incredibly missed.
Today's Birthday Suit
Gérard Depardieu pictured below, right, in Bertolucci's 1900, turns 73 today. We've shared this gif before because it's a still-shocking NSFW reminder that the 1970s were completely wild cinematically and 21st century movies are about as asexual as you can get.
Today's young moviegoers are surely unfamiliar with Depardieu which is sad. Global film history should be taught in schools and celebrated (as should the arts in general). He still works constantly but his films don't travel like they used to. But he was a major international star all throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as familiar to US moviegoers then as international stars like say, Javier Bardem, Mads Mikkelsen, Marion Cotillard, and Isabelle Huppert are now. Depardieu headlined or co-starred in several films that received Oscar nominations including Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (1978), The Last Metro (1980), My American Uncle (1980), The Return of Martin Guerre (1982), Camille Claudel (1988), Cyrano de Bergerac (1990), Hamlet (1996), 102 Dalmatians (2000) and Vatel (2000).
Today's Bonus Birthday Suit
Today is also the 119th anniversary of the birth of Marlene Dietrich, queen of onscreen androgyny. Or in today's parlance, a gender nonconformist. She was wearing men's suits and tuxes when doing so was so irregular that she really caused a stir. Such swagger... such BDE she had. And what a fantastic actress, too. See Witness for the Prosecution, Blonde Venus, Morocco, etcetera.
Other showbiz types with birthdays or anniversaries today: Olivia Cooke (The Sound of Metal), Shocking director Gaspar Noé (Irreversible, Climax), Emilie de Ravin (Once Upon a Time, Lost), Lily Cole (The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, Elizabeth I), Yu Xing (Kung Fu Hustle, Ip Man), Masi Kora (Heroes), Michel Piccoli (Topaz, Belle de Jour), Sarah Vowell (This American Life, The Incredibles), Actor/pianist Oscar Levant (An American in Paris), actress Charmian Carr (Liesl in The Sound of Music), Tony winner Tovah Feldshuh (Golda's Balcony, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), Maryam D'Abo (The Living Daylights), Iceland's Hera Hilmar (Life in a Fishbowl, Anna Karenina), Bollywood's Salman Kahn (Sultan, Bajrangi Bhaijaan), Wilson Cruz (My So Called Life, Star Trek Discovery), Aaron Standorf (X2, Tadpole), Wrestler Chyna, Actor/director Joe Mantello (Boys in the Band, Hollywood), and Zhou Dongyu (who stars in Hong Kong's current Oscar submission Better Days).
Reader Comments (19)
Love love Ava Gardner in 'Show Boat' - I think she deserved a nomination for Best Supporting Actress that year.
I wouldn't mind seeing a remake of Show Boat even though I do love the MGM 50's version and agree with Tyler about the beauty of Ava Gardner's performance and the wrongness of her dearth of a nomination.
Marlene Dietrich has such a mesmerizing individual presence on screen. Her starring films were sometimes a strange lot but entertaining and when given a chance she was a compelling actress.
I guess I liked Erin Brokovich more at the time, but I thought Traffic was a more complex movie to pull off so I had no problem with Soderbergh winning for Traffic and was honestly just shocked that he was able to pull it off. I thought he would divide his vote, but I guess the ones who got divided were the "spectacle" votes for Gladiator and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (which I would have voted for).
Showboat would be a great new movie, but who would go to see it to justify the extreme budget it would require?
And I sort of thought that Gerard Depardieu had lost his mind and that had hurt his movie stardom more than his, er, girth?
Gérard Depardieu got naked a lot in the 70s. In one of them (The Last Woman), he is naked almost throughout the entire running time. He also fondles a toddlers genitals twice, and does something horrendous to himself at the end - so it's a wild film, I guess.
There is nothing like the song Old Man River as song in this movie.
I didn't care for either Sodebergh movie that year but Traffic seemed like the harder movie to pull off with all the different storylines coming together coherently.
- Yeah, "gender nonconformist" feels more appropriate than "androgynous" to describe Dietrich because even in a tuxedo, there was nothing masculine or even boyish about Marlene. She could be a tough dame, a cool customer, a femme fatale, and she was all woman. She just looked great in slacks, she knew it and didn't give a fuck.
- That 1900 gif is hypnotic. Bobby, those were the days.
- Traffic > Erin Brockovich (which like the Oceans films is a great star vehicle and a textbook case of How to Get a Best Actress Oscar).
Marlene Dietrich has the sexual confidence we should all aspire to. She was bisexual and was as out as one could be at the time. Years later, a book on the "sewing circles" of Hollywood was leaked and several women denied the allegations about them. But Dietrich was just like "Meh, whatever"
I never knew Bobby De Niro exposed his cock on camera before.
The 2000 Oscars had two huge shocks.. Traffic in director and Marcia Gay Harden in supporting actress. In fact, best picture was seen as a true tossup between Gladiator, Crouching Tiger, and Traffic. Love those unpredictable years. We rarely get those
I appreciate the Depardieu vindication. I recently rewatched All the Mornings of the World and he is so good and the movie is so beautiful. Also saw Danton for the first time. I didn't like the movie but he's a force of nature in it.
Movies use to be a lot more sexier is this the fault of all the free porn on the internet? Your are right about remaking "Show Boat" but who are you going to get to sing those songs?
@ Jaragon
Don't blame porn. ;-) American TV got sexier as American movies got more prudish. But that went hand-in-hand with the reduction of tobacco and alcohol on the big screen as well.
I do prefer the 1951 version of Showboat to the 1936 version (not enough Julie in '36 although Irene Dunne and Paul Robeson are magnificent). 1951 has stunning color, the fine stars who can sing (Ava dubbed, but her performance was so poignant as Julie). Marlene Dietrich one of a kind beauty and talent, also awesome in "The Blue Angel" (singing "Falling In Love Again"), "Destry Rides Again" and "Touch Of Evil". I thought "Traffic" was enthralling, more so than "Erin." I re-watched "Chicago" recently and it is still tremendous. How did those two (Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renee Zellweger) dance in such perfect harmony in the last number? Utterly amazing.
I have that movie 1900 on DVD in its uncut version. An amazing film that everyone should see once though some of the political content was way over my head. I need to re-watch it.
Knots Landing was on TV for 14 years. Wow, no wonder God liked that show.
Best article featuring Chalamet today! Honorable mention to the longwinded, but heartfelt Juan.
Depardieu is most known for young Europeans form Asterix but maybe Americans don’t watch those films at all. But his current life hasn’t been most scandal free...
And it’s good thing there isn’t porn in films anymore (people like to say it’s art when reviewing the film and make other articles where they say it was their sexual awakening or say they like to be turned on by some actors) and it’s not just in US like some say where this trend is happening but everywhere. It’s always people discussing US regarding current day and Europe in the past and most niche artistic films and not the mainstream movies. It’s not like there aren’t any US films with sex scenes, it’s just the European films with sex get most attention in US so that changes the perspection. The main difference in Europe and US sex scenes is that women are less objectified and that people who have sex scenes aren’t always attractive. And nudity can just be nudity, not sexy.
Re: DeNiro n Depardieu....😱 is tt lady doing wat i tink she is doing?!! 😂😆
In wat context is she is doing tt for?