Actor Lee Van Cleef was born 100 years ago today, on 09-January-1925. He was a veteran of World War Two. He became known for playing bad guys in western movies and television shows. Then he became famous appearing in spaghetti westerns like Serio Leone's For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood were a good team. From there, Van Cleef went on to appear in many more spaghetti westerns.
Charlie Parker, sax player, composer and music visionary, was born 100 years ago today, on 29-August-1920. Charlie Parker and his friend Dizzy Gillespie were two of the founding fathers of bebop. Bird influenced everyone.
Bird had an addiction to heroin and other opioids, but it didn't rule his life right away. He made many recordings and influenced young musicians like Miles Davis and Jackie McLean. Parker tried to tell young musicians not to copy his drug use, but many wound up addicted to heroin.
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Clint Eastwood made a movie called Bird, which starred Forrest Whitacker as Parker. The movie showed him as being screwed up his whole life. That is an exaggeration.
People often say that Bird With Strings is one of their favorite albums.
Actress and director Sondra Locke has died. I enjoyed her work in movies like The Gauntlet and Bronco Billy. Most of the articles about her devote more time to her relationship with Clint Eastwood than her
Actor John Hillerman has died. My wife always remembers him talking about his struggle to overcome his Texas accent. I always remember him from Blazing Saddles and another Mel Brooks movie, History of the World, Part I. Peter Bogdanovich used him in several movies. Clint Eastwood used him in High Plains Drifter. I saw a couple of episodes of Magnum, PI.
Happy 75th birthday to actress Jessica Walter. She is most famous for playing the difficult fan in Play Misty for Me. Clint Eastwood starred and played the Carmel disc jockey.
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I remember her in John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix as the racer's wife who cheated with James Garner.
The San Francisco Arts Commission sponsors the Art on Market Street
Program, which has local artists put up a series of works on bus
shelters on Market Street. Iconic City Hall is a series by Kelli Inouye
which depicts movies that have used San Francisco's beautiful City
Hall.
Don Siegel directed Clint Eastwood in five movies. The most famous is probably Dirty Harry from 1971. I didn't like the politics, but I admired Eastwood's performance and the San Francisco settings, which included City Hall.
I read the Mad Magazine version, "Dirty Larry," before I saw the movie.
