Tag: King Kong

Happy 106th Birthday, Jean Harlow!

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Jean Harlow, the original Blonde Bombshell, was born Harlean Harlow Carpenter 106 years ago today in Kansas City, Missouri. Here are 10 JH Did-You-Knows:

  • Harlow, the daughter of a dentist and his wife, left home at 16 to marry Charles McGrew, a businessman seven years her senior. The pair moved to Los Angeles, where Harlow was soon garnering assignments as an extra in pictures.

  • Her marriage to McGrew ended after just two years, allowing Harlow to focus on her career. She soon graduated from extra work to bit parts in features and shorts.

  • Harlow’s big break came in 1930 when she was cast in Howard Hughes‘ World War I epic, Hell’s Angels. The picture’s premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood was reported to have drawn a crowd of 50,000 people.

  • Hughes sold Harlow’s contract to MGM, where her star continued to ascend. Her work in Frank Capra‘s Platinum Blonde (1931) was very well received, and the following year she was paired with Clark Gable in John Ford‘s Red Dust, the second of six pictures she and Gable would appear in together during her short career.

  • Harlow is said to have turned down lead role in Freaks (1932) and King Kong (1933).

  • Harlow served as godmother to Millicent Siegel, the daughter of gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. She also dated mobster Abner “Longie” Zwillman, who advanced her career by loaning Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, $500,000.

  • In 1935, Harlow demanded more money from MGM, refusing to work until they assented, and while she was on strike, she wrote a novel, Today Is Tonight. It wasn’t published until 1965, early thirty years after her death.

  • Both Harlow and Marilyn Monroe starred opposite Gable in their final pictures—Harlow in Saratoga (1937) and Monroe in The Misfits (1961). Monroe idolized Harlow and refused the chance to play her in a biopic because she felt the script was not respectful to Harlow.

  • At the time of her death, Harlow was engaged to actor William Powell (and had been for two years). Had the pair married, Powell would have been Harlow’s fourth husband.

  • Though rumors long persisted that her mother, a Christian Scientist, refused medical care for her daughter, or that Harlow died of alcohol abuse, sunstroke, poisoning due to her platinum hair dye or any of a number of other causes, Harlow’s passing, at the young age of 26, came as a result of kidney failure.

Happy birthday, Jean Harlow, wherever you may be!

Jean Harlow

Happy 109th Birthday, Fay Wray!

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Fay Wray was born Vina Fay Wray 109 years today in Cardston, Alberta. We have a special fondness for Ms. Wray, given that, some years ago, we enjoyed a brief but memorable encounter with her. Here are 10 FW Did-You-Knows:

  • Though born in Canada, Wray grew up in Utah and Southern California and began working as an extra in pictures as a teen. Her first credited roles were in westerns made at Universal.

  • In 1926, The Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers chose her as one of thirteen young actresses most likely to be stars in Hollywood (Janet Gaynor and Mary Astor were among the other twelve chosen that year).

  • After early success in westerns, Wray became known as a scream queen, due to a run of horror pictures she made in the early 1930s, among them King Kong, Doctor X, Mystery of the Wax Museum, The Vampire Bat and The Most Dangerous Game.

  • Wray was paid $10,000 for her work in King Kong, a picture that was so successful it is said to have saved RKO Pictures from bankruptcy.

  • Wray valued her writing abilities over her acting career. She published an autobiography—On the Other Hand: A Life Story—and saw one of her plays, The Meadowlark, produced. (She collaborated with Sinclair Lewis on another play, Angela Is Twenty-Two.)

  • She was offered the role of Rose in Titanic (1997), but turned it down, leaving the role open for Gloria Stuart.

  • Though she lived there only a few years, there is a fountain in Cardston that is named after Wray.

  • In the 1950s, Wray worked frequently on television, appearing twice on Alfred Hitchcock Presents and in three episodes of Perry Mason, among many others.

  • Peter Jackson had hoped to have Wray speak the final line in his 2005 remake of King Kong, but she passed away, aged 96, before the picture finished filming.

  • Two days later, the lights on the Empire State Building were dimmed for 15 minutes as a tribute to her.

Happy birthday, Fay Wray, wherever you may be!

Fay Wray

The Cladrite Radio Gorillas Galore Giveaway

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Gorillas Galore Giveaway of three Sons of Kong DVD setsIt’s time for one of our periodic sweepstakes, and we don’t mind telling you: We’re pretty excited about the Gorillas Galore Giveaway.

We’re giving away not one, not two, but three “Sons of Kong” boxed DVD sets to lucky Cladrite Radio followers. Each set comes with 10 movies on three discs, and a goofier gaggle of gorilla pictures you’d be hard-pressed to find.

Just check out these titles:

We’re confident you’ll agree that that’s one impressive assortment of simian silliness. And this bounty of cinematic missteps comes in pop-up packaging that you’ll be proud to display in your home!

How to enter? Easy. Just follow us on Facebook and Twitter (if you haven’t followed us on either or both of those platforms, now’s your chance to rectify that—just follow the links on the upper left), watch for our posts/tweets about the giveaway and share/retweet them with the hashtag #crgorillagiveaway. You can enter once per post per platform. The entry period ends at midnight ET on Wednesday, July 6. (Sorry, this giveaway is open to residents of the U.S. and Canada only.)

So don’t delay: Follow us on Facebook and Twitter and get in the game! Sharing from our website is always appreciated, but to enter the giveaway, you’ll have to share/retweet on Facebook or Twitter!

King Kong Returns!

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Filmmaker Travis Threlkel and photographer Louie Psihoyos tonight teamed to project digital light images of endangered species on the Empire State Building in what the New York Times called “an art event meant to draw attention to the creatures’ plight and possibly provide footage for a coming documentary.”

For their part, Threlkel and Psihoyos termed the event a “weapon of mass instruction.”

We were there to experience the show with a couple of pals, and as soon we arrived at the corner of 30th and Fifth, we turned to them and remarked, “What we’d like to see is a giant ape climbing that building.”

Not five seconds after that crack, the show began again (it was running on a loop every few minutes), and our wish was granted.

A Reynolds wrap

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Many years ago, we attended a “Hollywood: Legend and Reality,” an exhibition of movie memorabilia from the Golden Age of Hollywood at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. The exhibition included such offerings as an eight-inch gorilla figure used in the filming of the original King Kong, the golden calf from Cecil B. DeMille‘s The Ten Commandments, Rudolph Valentino‘s matador costume from Blood and Sand (1922), Tom Mix‘s 10-gallon hat, and best of all, for our money, Sam’s piano from Casablanca. We wanted so badly to reach out and tinkle those tiny keys (the piano’s a miniature, with something fewer than 88 keys, sized so that it might be easily pushed from table to table in a nightclub, as Dooley Wilson does in Rick’s Cafe.

Looking back, we’re now left wondering if a number of the artifacts in that exhibition weren’t loaned by Debbie Reynolds. Reynolds long held out hope that her extensive (to put it mildly) collection of Hollywood memorabilia would one day be housed in a museum, but with no funding forthcoming, she’s now auctioning much of it off. The sale is to be held on June 18.

“My lifetime dream has been to assemble and preserve the history of the Hollywood film industry. Hollywood has been an enormous part of my life as I know it has been for countless fans all over the world. This collection represents a lifetime of collecting Hollywood artifacts and this is a rare opportunity to own a piece of Hollywood History for those who love the movies as much as I do. For the first time in nearly five decades, these iconic pieces will be made available to the public through a series of auctions presented by Profiles in History beginning in June 2011.”—Debbie Reynolds

It’s hard to name a star who’s not represented in Reynolds’ collection. Humphrey Bogart? A brown sport coat he wore in Knock on Any Door (1948) is up for auction. Harpo Marx? One of his familiar top hats with attached blonde wig is included (it was a gift from Harpo to Reynolds many years ago). Judy Garland? There are no fewer than seven items associated with her up for sale, including the blue dress she wore playing Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz.

We could go on and on. It’s a very impressive collection, and frankly, it’s heartbreaking that these amazing pieces will now go into the hands of private collectors, quite possibly never again to be enjoyed by the general public. It’s a crying shame that the collection couldn’t have been kept together and placed on permanent exhibition somewhere, anywhere.

The official website for the auction has much more information (if you’re in the Los Angeles area, you should make it a point to attend the public previews that precede the sale; who knows when you’ll again have the opportunity to see these treasures?). There’s also a bound catalogue for sale on the website for $39.50, but for those of us for whom even that is a bit more than we’re comfortable spending, there’s a PDF catalogue for the downloading, too.