Favorite bit at 5:00 minute mark: "Hey Ed! He's got a picture of your wife!"
http://www.youtube.com/watc…

I remember first hearing about Nellie Bly years ago in a PBS documentary about her. It was mostly about her. You're right a fictional TV show about her would be great.

This part of Teresa Wright's Wikpedia page made me laugh:

She seemed to have fond memories of him too. One of the few actresses I know who had. She was under contract by Samuel Goldwyn and was loaned out to work on Shadow of a Doubt.

THE BIRDS isn't his best(the whole thing with Rod Taylor's possessive mom played by Jessica Tandy is tedious) but that scene where Tippi Hedren is sitting on a bench and behind her the playground slowly fills with hundreds of crows is fantastic.
Disaster movies nowadays do not have that level of tension.

I love Rear Window.

She's one of my favorites from the Golden age of Hollywood. The epitome of the girl-next-door.

I like the love theme that Alex North wrote for Spartacus is basically only three notes.

The problem with armies advancing so far is the supply lines can't go the distance.

What's amazing was after the Battle of the Somme where 20,000 British soldiers were killed in one day, instead of wanting peace, and end the senseless slaughter, the attitude on the homefront was to keep going until absolute victory was achieved. The British wanted the enemy to pay.

I think that's not far from the truth. Tanks and mobilized armor helped keep it from being a repeat of trench warfare.

Reading a book about World War I right now and the countries going in were totally unprepared for how much artillery and modern technology would change how war was fought. They thought it would be over by the end of 1914, instead it was five years of bloody stalemate.

I'll never forget the one condemned prisoner who was so confident and bragging to the others but ends up crying and begging for his life on his way to the firing squad.

Spielberg gives Slocombe a lot of credit for the actual Kali temple set in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom looking like Hell on Earth. The use of lights with red gels to give the impression of lava from the ground was extraordinary:

I love the lighting inside the Nepal bar:

Having just re-read the book of interviews Francois Truffaut did with Alfred Hitchcock, it wasn't so much a "Frog conspiracy" as Nichols says on American Masters. The French critics weren't so much devaluing or trying to tear down directors like William Wyler or George Stevens, but trying to get respect for filmmakers…

Roger Ebert also hated FIGHT CLUB, calling it "Macho porn". What he didn't get was the movie was a big critique of the Baby Boomer generation, especially the part where Pitt and Ed Norton destroy a VW beetle(the newer model). On the other hand when I see Tyler Durden make his big speech about how their generation has…

And guys who looked like Hoffman didn't get lead roles at the time.

Having seen some other movies made at the same time I get why THE GRADUATE was so popular with the youth of the time, even though the characters of Ben and Elaine weren't really counter-culture. It was the first movie that said the values of the older generation, the one that moved to the suburbs after WWII, were…

I still feel bad for that poor lady who had her hands crushed when that magic trick went wrong.