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A work in progress...
© Tony Crawley 2020
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TC by GM - back in the day when this fetish started.

WELCOME TO THE COVID

Posters for our time - by French photographer Victor Chevalier.

Lockdown. Shockdown. Blockdown. Tik-Tokdown. Yeah, it’s been good… well, interesting. Finally able to catch a few movies I’d missed. From Contagious to Contagion, by way of Carriers and Containment - and that’s just stuff from my A-C drawer.
There were more… Two called Virus (one Japanese, the other a lame tele-flck), two more called The Plague (only one from the Albert Camus novel) and three from the same Richard Mathison book, I Am Legend. Plus… Blindness, Domain, The Satan Bug, 28 Days Later, Panic in the Street…
They involved such folk as Dustin Hoffman, Sophia Loren, Richard Widmark, Gwyneth Paltrow (as a spreader), even OJ Simpson… Oh and Kate Winslet pronouncing: "The average person touches their face 2- or 3000 times a day. Three to five times every waking minute. In between, we're touching doorknobs, water fountains, elevator buttons and each other. Those things become fomites."
On to the imports… Canada’s Rabid, Japan’s Day of Resurrection, Korea’s Flu, Yugslavia’s Variloa Vera (about their real 1972 smallpox epidemic), the Franco-Spanish Last Days… and Peter Fleischmann’s excellent Franco-German Hamburg Syndrome - about to be on VOD Vimeo (good news), under the original title: Die Hamburger Krankheit.

Another Social Distance movie - The Hamburg Syndrome

No, not from your streets last month but The Hamburg Syndrome
- made 41 years ago [Filmverlag de Autoren, 1979].

There was even a company called Epidemic Films! It produced Ever Since the World Ended… with such rotten acting that the cast must have just learnt they’d tested positive.
Writing in The New Yorker, Anthony Lane found some pandemicals that must be on Don Trumpolino’s Top Five Movies list. He surely adored Outbreak’s gungho general wanting "to firebomb the town of Cedar Creek, California, population 2,600, with… the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in our arsenal. It, sucks in all available oxygen to the core, vaporises everything within a mile of ground zero, men, women, children, and one airborne virus. Destruction complete. Case closed. Crisis over."
Plus this Andromeda Strain scene. "By then, the disease could spread into a worldwide epidemic." "It’s because of rash statements like that the President doesn’t trust scientists." Hah!
But the Don’s #1 would have to be Carriers with Chris Pine actually saying: "We’ve got loads of Clorox."

NAME GAME

KIRK WORK

Did you happen to notice an actor-rapper called Orson Chaplin popping up in such series as American Horror Story, Lucifer and Ray Donovan. He's Charlie's grandson (and son of a Superman producer and Charlie’s daughter, Jane). So why Orson? Well, Orson Welles was Charlie’s friend. Indeed, it was Welles who gave (well sold!) Chaplin the idea for Monsieur Verdoux - "the cleverest and most brilliant film of my career."

Matt Damon was the hot tip for James T Kirk in the new Star Trek franchise in 2008. He heard the rumours, checked his mails, called his agent. Nothing! So he called producer-director-rebooter JJ Abrams, who told him the (bitter) truth. "How about playing his dad!" Er, no thank you! JJ said Damon passed on George Kirk for "the most gracious and understandable and logical of reasons." JJ left it there, explaining nothing.

YOU HAD ME AT ...

Cameron Crowe’s first ideas for the Jerry Maguire couple looked downright incestuous - Tom Hanks and Winona Ryder… or Tom Cruise and Winona! Once Hanks passed, Crowe started searching for Tom's Girl: Dorothy. Patricia Arquette, Cameron Diaz, Bridget Fonda, Janeane Garofalo, Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Lopez, Courtney Love, Parker Posey, Molly Ringwald, Mira Sorvino, Marisa Tomei, Uma Thurman, even Zellweger came and went. Recommended by Edward Burns (a possible Jerry), Connie Britton made a good test with Cruise and she was Dorothy - depending on Zellweger's call back meeting with Tom. "We have video of that because I was filming," Crowe told Deadline Hollywood in 2017, "and you just see something happen when Tom sees her. He lights up… As Jerry discovers Dorothy, we discover Renée. That was a very personal thing for me and the way I feel about movies."


SWEET MARILYN She lost Baby Doll, Can-Can, Freud, Harlow. So what! She was sublime in Some Like It Hot.	BEST SELLERS "What role?" "All of them!" said Stanley Kubrick. Sellers never finished this fourth ...	LITTLE SHIRLEY After lavish tests of Shirley Temple for 1949's Little Women, MGM chose Janet Leigh as Meg.	TOM JONESHow Indiana Jones was supposed to look. With Steven Spielberg’s first choice. Tom Selleck.

DOC HOLLYWOOD

Once upon a time, Hollywood decided to make a Doctor Who film. Even Spielberg tried to get involved. The 1996 idea was a pilot for a USeries to exhume Aunty's science-fiction cult, buried since 1989 after 26 seasons. And who do you think the suits at Universal contemplated for the eighth Time Lord? Oh, just about everybody… Take a deep breath…First, Jim Carrey, Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks. The BBC co-producers checked 60 others… from the oldest, Peter O'Toole, 64, to a young New Yorker, Scott Weiner, 21.
OK, that leaves 58 more. But you don’t want a lengthy scroll of actors, do you? OK, just a few then… Two Bonds: Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan. Two Caligulas: John Hurt, Malcolm McDowell. Two future Game of Throners: Sean Bean, Liam Cunningham. Two brothers: Mark and Paul McGann. But enuff, enuff! I don't have the space here. You'll find all the surprises on the Doc’s page in Special Movies. (Russell Crowe, Rutger Hauer, Rob Lowe, Ian McKellen, Eddie Murphy). What? Oh, Paul McGann won the role.

HOW YOU DOIN?

Phoebe, Ross, Rachel, Joey, Monica and Chandler - and those who almost played them - have finally made it into the Special Movies section. Among a few other TV classics: Doctor Who, Seinfeld and The Sopranos.

RIP. Peter Jackson, obviously, said it best...
I'm feeling very sad at the passing of Sir Ian Holm ... such a delightful, generous man. Quiet, but cheeky, with a lovely twinkle in his eye. Watching Ian Holm perform taught me so much – as Ian was being his usual quiet self, that just somehow happened. It was a privilege to work with him, and a blessing to know him. I've always loved Ian's performance in the final scenes of Return of the King. "I think I'm quite ready for another adventure." Farewell, dear Bilbo. Safe travels, darling Ian.

Photo ©redits:

All The President's Men and Godfather montages: Reg Oliver, 1976; Marlon Brando: Paramount Pictures, 1960; Covid-19 posters: Victor Chevalier, 2020; Doctor Who: Universal/BBC, 1996; Friends, Warner Bros/NBC TV; The Hamburg Syndrome: Filmverlag de Autoren, 1979; Daisy Ridley: Lucasfilm/Disney, 2018; Peter Sellers: Hawk Films/Columbia Pictures, 1963; Shirley Temple: Selznick International Pictures, 1946; TC sketch: Graham Marsh, 1976; Thunderball: Eon Productions, 1965. Wizards of the Lost Kingdom, Concorde Pictures, 1985. Ian Holm: New Line Productions, 2003. Marilyn Monroe: Tim Kelley, 1949. Plus enormous thanks to The Man: Daniel Bouteiller.

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WELCOME to a unique directory of what you never saw on-screen. The films the stars did not make. The movies that never were. The most definitive collation of casting stories ... Check up on all the films - of yesterday, today and tomorrow - that your favourite stars never made... A cast of thousands - 8,063 actors - to click on... More than 40 years in the making!! And 2,502,855 words of spirited text. The ultimate in movie trivia ... Better! Exactly the kind of history that Hollywood deserves. Back to front. Upside-down. Inside out. Full of flashbacks, close-ups, tracking shots (and, alas some badly edited sequences - sorry about that!) forming a fascinating, new and often bizarre flip-side perspective on your treasured movies and stars.

This is the film that bred this site ... after Robert Redford told me he'd planned a little black-white version - with Robert De Niro, and Michael Moriarty as Woodstein.

BOND LADY

Elisabeth Counsell tested (among the many) for Bond’s masseuse Patricia Fearing in Thunderball, 1965. Previously she (or her left knee) had been in From Russia With Love. "In a punt going by with an actor called Michael Culver." She won 71 other roles since 1962 (producing two of them) in a variety of series from Doctor At Sea and Fame Is The Spur to the more recent Cold Call and The Split.

WHERE TO FIND ..?

PERFECT GRYSHENKA

How Hollywood ruined Marilyn Monroe's dream role in The Brothers Karamazov is on Marilyn's page - item #17

FULL METAL HALL

For the fullest story of why Anthony Michael Hall did not make Stanley Kubrick's 'Nam classic, go to Hall's page. (The blue section).

STREEP KONG

Meryl v Italian producer Dino de Laurentiis. Read all about it - in her first item.

TORN APART

Why didn't Rip Torn make Easy Rider - see his blue section on his page.

She said title

Sex is funny. - Heather Graham

I planned on having one husband and seven children, but it turned out the other way around. - Lana Turner

Yes, well, if you don't have range when you’re my age, you better quit ... Playing Michelle Pfeiffer's mother is nice work if you can get it. And now I've played Julianne Moore’s mother. I've played Nicole Kidman's mother. I've played a number of fabulous people's mothers. - Hollywood’s Holland Taylor

You have to pay for the DDs in LaDD..! - Jordan Ladd (Alan's grand-daughter, Cheryl's daughter) on refusing toplessness

I've always been a modern woman, and I still am… I'm wilful… extremely impulsive. I'm like a steamroller - I just go forward. Someone falls down in front of me, then I fall in love with him. - Britt Ekland at 77

No drugs. No sex-tapes. - Jennifer Lawrence’s message to new young actresses

I could do movies non-stop, even if there were no film, no result, just for the pleasure of being with the crew. It’s like summer camp! I couldn't live without a crew. Well, I wish I could live with a soccer team! - Beatrice Dalle

Everyone's so much smaller than they seem. - Daisy Ridley meeting stars

When other little girls wanted to be ballet dancers I kinda wanted to be a vampire. - Angelina Jolie

The average Hollywood film star's ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend. – Katharine Hepburn

I need to know what it's for. If you can't really tell why you've got your tits out, you're probably in the wrong scene. - Phoebe Waller-Bridge on screen nudity

I've been on a calendar, but I've never been on time. – Marilyn Monroe

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