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).