Tag archives: Hollywood
In 1923, two builders named Woodruff and Shoults built a huge promotional gimmick on Mt. Lee above Los Angeles. The row of standalone white block letters, each measuring 30’ x 50’ and visible for miles, would proclaim their new housing development in those hills: HOLLYWOODLAND. Nine years later a forlorn actress would leap to her […]
1974. The Oscars. The place is packed with Old and New Hollywood cognoscenti. Groucho Marx and Tatum O’Neal are breathing the same air, though likely from separate tables. Henry Mancini (Henry Mancini!!) is in the pit conducting the Academy Awards Orchestra. Now Burt Bacharach and the amazing Ann-Margret are at the dais – Burt in […]
The halcyon days of Hollywood moviemaking have been showing up in unusual places recently, including as the setting for the Music Academy of the West’s grand opera production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. This iteration of Don Giovanni – a morality tale centered on the legendary libertine whose unbridled desire and hypocrisy eventually led to his […]
I recently reconnected with an old friend from Crane Country Day School, Blake Ladd. We both entered Crane at the same time and had the same unfettered enthusiasm for the arts and creative energy. For this week’s Dear Montecito, I bring you an update on one of Montecito’s greatest – a great actor, entrepreneur, and […]
Debbie Price caught the Hollywood bug when she glimpsed festival klieg lights. “It was opening night of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival at the Arlington Theatre,” she says. “I saw Robert Mitchum, Jane Seymour, Kirk and Michael Douglas, Peter Cetera and others arriving – my first celebrity sightings.” She has since attended 36 of […]
Another dance at the high school gym. So predictable. The punchbowl, the bored chaperones, the colored lights borrowed from the theater department, all that dangling dime store chiffon. But the Jets and the Sharks are using the dance as a pretext for some sort of war council. Righteous, daddio! Bernardo, leader of the Sharks, is […]
Russ Tamblyn, who was nominated for an Oscar for portraying Norman Page in the movie Peyton Place before playing Riff in West Side Story, has just published a memoir called Dancing on the Edge: A Journey of Living, Loving, and Tumbling Through Hollywood. Tamblyn, who grew up as a dancer and tumbling gymnast before hitting […]
Tim Matheson has been acting since he was a teenager and has a list of credits that runs to many pages, but the onetime Montecito resident (1994-2010, the only time he lived more than minutes from Hollywood) might still be best known for playing rush chairman Eric “Otter” Stratton in National Lampoon’s Animal House – […]
If you’ve ever watched David Lean’s legendary Lawrence of Arabia on a “hand-held device” (a noun-hyphenate that describes lots of swell gadgets these days) you will have noticed that the film’s breathtaking Battle of Aqaba looks like a bunch of ants streaming across a baloney sandwich. Is cinematic splendor about scale? Yeah, partly. It’s also […]
Montecito’s proximity to Los Angeles has long made our village the jewel in the crown for location scouts seeking blue-chip environs for unforgettable Hollywood classics. And then there is the great Olivia de Havilland’s silver screen zenith and its intersection with Montecito. “They shot Gone with the Wind in Montecito?!” No, you lovable fool. I’m […]
This is the story of three Vlads. Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Volodymyr Palahniuk, whom you knew by his stage name: Jack Palance. I did not know until recently that Jack Palance died here in Montecito at the home of his daughter Holly. Nor did I know until fairly recently how much Holly Palance has […]
As a writer, you never really know what you are writing until, well, it’s written. Much like life, writing can take you in unexpected directions, but the touch of a great writer will always bring you back. Surrounded by writing her entire life, Victoria Riskin (known as Vicki to most) has been penning her own […]
Carpinteria-based actor Ashton Kutcher and actress wife, Mila Kunis, have put their Beverly Hills home back on the market – with a substantial price drop. When it was last listed for sale, the five-bedroom, five-and-a-half bath 7,351 sq. ft. three-story home in the gated community of Hidden Valley, was priced at $14 million. Now the […]
In recent weeks, sharks have been circling the waters off the coast of Santa Barbara. It is a scientific fact that certain species of shark must always move forward, constantly feeding, or else they will die. This is true of Mako sharks. It’s true of hammerheads. It is true of Great Whites. My big question […]
On a personal note, I remember the legendary Hollywood icon Robert Evans, who produced The Godfather and Chinatown. Bob, who died at his magnificent Beverly Hills mansion aged 89, was also thrown into the spotlight when his fifth wife Love Story actress Ali MacGraw left him for actor Steve McQueen. He was also married to […]
Alida Aldrich was born in 1947 in Hancock Park, California to famed Hollywood director Robert Aldrich (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, the Dirty Dozen and the Longest Yard); her mother was Grace Foster. Both were from Warwick Neck, Rhode Island, the tony enclave on the Narragansett Bay – across from Newport. Her parents were born […]
One of the things I’m glad to have learned in high school physics was the explanation of why movies “move.” The fact is that those projected pictures don’t really move at all. But, if your eye sees a number of still pictures in rapid sequence, and each one is only slightly different from the preceding […]
It’s not accurate to term the new film series at UCSB’s Pollock Theater “#MeToo at the Movies”, but there’s also no denying that the increased attention on women in Hollywood played a part in the Carsey-Wolf Center’s “Women in Comedy” screenings that get underway this week. Five different films will be shown during the series, […]
The Hollywood crowd must be asking why the Oscar’s ratings continued to decline again this year? Why is it that more people don’t want to watch a bunch of glitzy starlets with boob jobs and drunk on their own self-importance trying to impress each other? Could it be that they can’t help themselves from using […]
If any of you have been to the Magic Castle in Hollywood, you probably know its owners are Milt and Arlene Larsen, who live right here in Santa Barbara. There will soon be a Magic Castle Cabaret located at the Bird Refuge. It will be a private club with 200 members and a dress code: […]
