Italian journalist and filmmaker Gualtiero Jacopetti died August 17, at age 91. Together with co-director Franco Prosperi, Jacopetti invented what became known as the “mondo” movie – after the title of their first collaboration, Mondo Cane (Dog’s World, 1962). The essence of the genre was shock – documentaries that displayed strange, disturbing aspects of human […]
Sad news this weekend. The inimitable Googie Withers has died at the age of 94 after a long and varied career in film, theatre and television. Although she worked with directors like Alfred Hitchcock (a small part in The Lady Vanishes [1938]), Michael Powell (a member of the resistance in One of Our Aircraft Is […]
Peter Yates died in London on January 9, aged 81. His two best-known films were Bullitt (1968) and Breaking Away (1979), and that perhaps indicates why he was not as widely known as many of his contemporaries. He directed a wide range of movies in many different genres, and for that reason never established a […]
A friend recently sent me a link to Turner Classic Movies’ annual tribute to people from the film industry who died this past year. It’s an elegantly assembled montage (far superior to the similar annual Oscar tributes): (Unfortunately, TCM doesn’t appear to archive these videos, so the link no longer functions.) I was surprised to […]
My personal acquaintance with Dino de Laurentiis was very brief. While I was working on David Lynch’s Dune in 1983, I saw Dino a number of times on his occasional visits to Estudios Churubusco in Mexico City. But only once were I and my co-documentarian Anatol Pacanowski introduced to him. We were working in our […]