Kurt Vogel Russell is an American television and film actor born on March 17, 1951, in Springfield, Massachusetts, the son of Louise Julia (née Crone), a dancer; and Bing Russell, a character actor, best-known for playing Deputy Clem Foster on Bonanza. His first acting roles were as a child in television series, including a lead role in the Western series The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters. In 1960, Walt Disney himself signed Russell to a 10 year contract. Once his stint as a child actor ended, he spent the early 1970s playing minor league baseball. 

In the early 1970s, Russell played second base for the California Angels Double-A minor league affiliate, the El Paso Sun Kings. During a play, he was hit in the shoulder by a player running to second base; the collision tore the rotator cuff in Russell’s right/throwing shoulder. Before his injury, he was leading the Texas League in hitting, with a .563 batting average. The injury forced his retirement from baseball in 1973 and led to his return to acting. 

He auditioned for the role of Han Solo in Star Wars but lost the role to Harrison Ford. 

In 1979, Russell was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or a Special for the made-for-television film Elvis. This would be his first pairing with John Carpenter, the director of Halloween. Although Russell did not perform the singing vocals in the series—which were provided by country music artist Ronnie McDowell—he would later go on to provide the voice of Elvis Presley in the 1994 film Forrest Gump.

He auditioned for the role of Flash Gordon (1980) but the part went to Sam J. Jones instead however, over the 1980s, Russell would team with Carpenter several times, helping create some of his best-known roles, usually as anti-heroes, including the infamous Snake Plissken of Escape from New York and its sequel, Escape from L.A.. Among their collaborations was 1982′s The Thing, based upon the short story Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, Jr., which had been interpreted on film before, albeit loosely, in 1951′s The Thing from Another World. In 1986, the two made Big Trouble in Little China, a dark kung-fu comedy/action film in which Russell played a truck driver caught in an ancient Chinese war. While the film was a financial failure like The Thing, it has since gained a cult audience. After a remake of Escape from New York was announced, Russell was reportedly upset with the casting of Gerard Butler for his signature character, Snake Plissken, as he believed the character ‘was quintessentially [...] American.

Finally, his career seemed to be seriously stalled. He only landed Tango & Cash (1989) after Patrick Swayze dropped out; Dennis Quaid was the first choice for the part in Backdraft (1991). In the end, these two roles were key in re-establishing him as a box-office draw

In 2006, Russell revealed that he was the director of Tombstone, not George P. Cosmatos, as credited. According to Russell, Cosmatos was recommended by Sylvester Stallone and was, in effect, a ghost director, much as he had been for Rambo: First Blood Part II. Russell said he promised Cosmatos he would keep it a secret as long as Cosmatos was alive; Cosmatos died in April 2005. Russell owns the rights to the masters and makes reference to possibly re-editing the film, as he was not originally involved in the editing.

It was long reported that the final written words of Walt Disney were Kurt Russell’s name scribbled on a piece of paper. Russell confirmed that he had seen the paper himself, but did not know what Disney was trying to convey.

Born Brigitte Eva Gisela Schittenhelm in Berlin, Helm’s first role was that of Maria and her double, the Maschinenmensch, in Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film Metropolis, which she began work on while only 16 years old. After Metropolis, Helm made over thirty other films, including talking pictures, before retiring in 1936. Her other film appearances include The Love of Ney (1927), Alraune (1928), L’Argent (1928), Gloria (1931), The Blue Danube (1932), L’Atlantide (1932), and Gold (1934).

In 1935, angered by Nazi control of the German film industry, she moved to Switzerland where she later had four children with her second husband Dr. Hugo von Kuenheim, an industrialist.

After her retirement from films she refused to grant any interviews concerning her film career. Helm was considered for the title role in Bride of Frankenstein before Elsa Lanchester was given the honor.

We met with the volunteer committee for the Crossroads Film Festival last night in Jackson. We have pledged to try and find them more volunteers for the fast approaching festival. If you are interested, here is the information you need:

www.crossroadsfilmfestival.com

They are looking for people for each of the three days in the following areas of interest:

Box Office/Ticket Sales, Festival Coordination, Hospitality, Marketing/PR, Workshops, Merchandise Sales, Parties/Receptions, Transportation (Must be 25+), Membership, and Audio/Visual Assistance.

Contact Connie Souto Learman at volunteer@crossroadsfilmfestival.com for more information.

The next and last volunteer meeting will be on Sunday, March 27th at 6:00 PM at the Rainbow Natural Grocery Co-Op in the Fondren neighborhood of Jackson, MS. 

If you can’t make it but still want to volunteer, be sure and contact Connie. Let’s help out our fellow film buffs and make this another great Crossroads Film Festival.

Our good friend has released another short for our viewing pleasure. I told him a few weeks ago, if he keeps it up, I am going to have to start referring to him as Baby Miike. 

Raoul Walsh, born Albert Edward Walsh March 11, 1887 was a director, actor and founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. As a child, he was friends with Virginia O’Hanlon, famous for her letter to Santa Claus that led to “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus”. He was also a friend of the famous Barrymores. John Barrymore, Drew’s grandfather, read in the Walsh family’s library as a child.

From IMDB

Raoul Walsh’s 52-year directorial career made him a Hollywood legend. Walsh was also an actor: He appeared in the first version of W. Somerset Maugham‘s Rain, renamed Sadie Thompson (1928) opposite Gloria Swanson in the title role. He would have played the Cisco Kid in his own film In Old Arizona (1928) if an errant jackrabbit hadn’t cost him his right eye by leaping through the windshield of his automobile. Warner Baxter filled the role and won an Oscar. Before John Ford and Nicholas Ray, it was Raoul Walsh who made the eye-patch almost as synonymous with a Hollywood director as Cecil B. DeMille‘s jodhpurs.

He interned with the best, serving as assistant director and editor on D.W. Griffith‘s racist masterpiece, The Clansman, better known as The Birth of a Nation (1915), a blockbuster that may have been the highest-grossing film of all time if accurate box office records had been kept before the sound era. He pulled triple duty on that picture, playing John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater and ranked as the most notorious American actor of all time until Pee Wee Herman (Paul Reubens).

The year before The Clansman, Walsh was second unit director on The Life of General Villa (1914), also playing the Mexican revolutionaryPancho Villa as a young man. Walsh got his start in the business as co-director of another Pancho Villa flick, The Life of General Villa (1914), in 1912. The movie featured footage shot of an actually battle between Villa’s forces and Mexican federal troops.

In 1915, in addition to helping out the great Griffith, Walsh directed no less than 14 films, including his first feature-length film, Regeneration(1915), which he also wrote. The movie starred silent cinema superstar Anna Q. Nilsson as a society woman turned social worker who aids the regeneration of a Bowery gang leader. It was a melodrama, but an effective one. In his autobiography, Walsh credited D.W. Griffith with teaching him about the art of filmmaking and about production management techniques. The film is memorable for its shots of New York City, where Walsh had been born 28 years earlier on March 11, 1887.

Raoul Walsh would continue to be a top director for 40 years and would not hang up his director’s megaphone (if he still had one at that late in the game) until 1964. As a writer, his last script was made in 1970, meaning his career as a whole spanned seven decades and 58 years.

He introduced the world to John Wayne in The Big Trail (1930) in 70mm wide-screen in 1930. It would take nine more years and John Ford to make the Duke a star. In one three-year period at Warner Bros., he directed The Roaring Twenties (1939), They Drive by Night (1940), High Sierra (1941), The Strawberry Blonde (1941), Manpower (1941), They Died with Their Boots On (1941), and Gentleman Jim (1942), among other films in that time frame. He helped consolidate the stardom of Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn while directing the great James Cagney in one of his more delightful films, The Strawberry Blonde (1941). This was the same director that would elicit Cagney’s most searing performance since The Public Enemy (1931) in the crime classic White Heat (1949).

Novelist Norman Mailer says that Walsh was dragged off of his death bed to direct the underrated film adaptation of Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1958). The movie is as masculine and unsentimental as the book, an exceedingly harsh look at the power relations between men at war on the same side that includes the attempted murder of prisoners of war and the “fragging” of officers (Sergeant Croft allows his lieutenant to walk into an ambush). Walsh was at his best when directing men in war or action pictures.

Raoul Walsh seemingly recovered from Mailer’s phantasmagorical death bed, as he lived another 22 years after The Naked and the Dead (1958). He died on December 31, 1980, in Simi Valley, California, at the age of 93.

WATCH ONE OF THESE FILMS: Jaws, Terms of Endearment, Goodfellas, The Empire Strikes Back, Boogie Nights, The Big Chill, Chicago, The Natural, A League of Their Own, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas

Once again, I have seen them all. Because this week focuses on the musical score, I think I will watch The Empire Strikes Back.

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