My husband, who is very into all things Abraham Lincoln, found a DVD that was only a couple of dollars. The casting was bizarre. The actor playing Lincoln was Sam Waterston (the lawyer in Law and Order), and Mary Lincoln was being played by Mary Tyler Moore! This is the most bizarre casting since Judy Dench played Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love...
I heard something that seems even stranger. I heard that Leonardo Di Caprio is on board to play Frank Sinatra in a biographical movie. I just don't think Leo has a high enough "cool quotient" to pull it off!
I think that Leonardo DiCaprio is an good actor, but I don't know about him carrying off Frank Sinatra! Can Leo sing? I don't know. BTW, when we worked in Palm Springs in the 70s, we got to meet Sinatra when he came into the supper club that was attached to the hotel. He was very polite and cordial, not the goon he was portrayed as, but maybe he was having a good night. His date was Eva Gabor, who was even prettier in person, a real knock-out.
I'm not sure whether or not he can sing... I suppose with enough dubbing of Sinatra's voice (that's most likely what they plan to do) no one would even care if he can't really sing for himself. How neat that you got to meet Sinatra and Eva. I didn't know they dated but it seems as if they'd be a nice match.
Yes, no one picked up Sinatra and Eva's little romance in the gossip magazines of the time. Palm Springs, at least then, was very tight-lipped about celebrities' doings; that's one reason so many of them came there.
You're totally right. We got to see alot of celebrities in less than flattering circumstances: drunk, angry, fighting with spouses... there wasn't any kind of tabloid that was looking for dirt back then. I can't imagine how much money is made today by the squealers...!
Well I can't pay you, but if you want to share some of the juciest, I'm all ears! Hehe Aw, com'on... no one really knows who you are after all.
By "goon", do you mean criminal or crime boss? During the Rat Pack's day he was far from "goon" material, IMHO.
I took it to mean just a simple "guy who's not easy to get along with"... but I could be wrong on this so I'll watch here for the answer, too.
I heard that Sinatra stood up to hotel owners who wouldn't let Black performers eat in their restaurants. If that's hard to get along with, we need more of it.
I meant "goon" as extremely bad-mannered, a bully. Sinatra used to beat people up with his "security" close by, to make sure S. was the winner. Or, he'd tell his "security" to beat someone up, and he'd watch. Perhaps I should have said "goonish", didn't mean to offend anyone, is that better? I give S. all the props in the world for standing behind Sammy Davis Jr, and helping him to beat his part of the colour barrier. (Read Yes I Can, SD Jr's autobiography, and you'll read about a very good side of S.) But, in other parts of his life, S. was an ***hole. Sorry, but it's true.
Sinatra's era was completely different from ours, so I bet some of his nasty behavior was simply accepted by those who have been groomed to feed it. The gender roles of the time take on a whole new color when they are augmented by money and a mistaken sense of entitlement.
Just as Abraham Lincoln in his time, can be thought to be a racist by today's folk who only judge his words and not factoring in the context of his time. In a time when the general public either were unsure that black people were even human beings, or that God's punishment made slavery his will; Lincoln's words show him to be, at the very least, progressive.
You're not kidding here... I've seen newspapers from eras past and it's unbelievable the things they were able to get away with... the labels.
It's a really good education into the time you're interested in to be able to read a newspaper or a popular magazine that was current. Just a little off topic, perhaps, but a few years ago a friend found an old copy of what I guess you could call the People Magazine of it's time, at her grandmother's house. We found an ad in it that was talking about Lysol and how effective it was, used for douching! That had to be the most *interesting* historical fact we gleaned from the mag!
