Happy heavenly birthday to the great Jean Cocteau!
La Belle et La Jonny
Category: Movies and Television
Blazing Pug Farts
Happy 100th birthday to the legendary Mel Brooks!
W
Happy heavenly birthday to the great Peter Lorre!
Jonny and Boris Meet Kojak
Anyone who lived through the 1970s should love this. (We realized after it went to print that Morgan Fairchild, who Jonny is depicted as making out with, was really more of a 1980s phenomenon. But Jonny was okay with that and, honestly, so were we.)
Meryl’s Choice
Happy birthday to the great Meryl Streep!
Vertipug
The Elephant Box
Happy heavenly birthday to the great Stan Laurel!
The Lady from Sherman Oaks
Around the Valley for 80 Bucks
21st Century
Hack had long dreamed of writing a rip-off of Howard Hawks’ 1934 screwball comedy Twentieth Century in which down-at-heel producer Oscar Jaffe (played by John Barrymore) must regain the affections of his estranged protégé (Carole Lombard) to tear her away from movie stardom and bring her back under his control, professional and otherwise. The plot takes place aboard the Twentieth Century Limited, the then-famous nonstop train from New York to Chicago, and it was hilarious from start to finish.
Hack’s problem was that he wanted to update the character of Lily Garland to modern times, but couldn’t think of an actress to model her after until he went through one of his frequent blackout drunks in which he had a graphically disturbing sex dream featuring Beverly Hillbillies star Nancy Kulp. When he awoke days later in a Barstow jail cell, he finally had the key to the story.