Whipped Cream Difficulties

Lawrence N. Brooks. He was 112 years old, and, at the time of his death, was the oldest surviving veteran of WWII.

Assigned to the mostly Black 91st Engineer General Service Regiment stationed in Australia — an Army unit that built bridges, roads and airstrips — Private Brooks served as a caretaker to three white officers, cooking, driving and doing other chores for them.

…

Mr. Brooks said he considered himself fortunate to have been spared combat duty when later in the war troop losses forced the military to send more African American troops to the front lines. In 1941, fewer than 4,000 African Americans were serving in the military; by 1945, that number had increased to more than 1.2 million.
“I got lucky,” he said. “I was saying to myself, ‘If I’m going to be shooting at somebody, somebody’s going to be shooting at me, and he might get lucky and hit.’”

By way of Lawrence: Willie Siros, noted Austin SF fan, book collector, book dealer, and a personal friend. (Apologies if that Facebook link is wonky: for some reason, I can view it on my phone, but I can’t view it on the big computer even in incognito mode. At least, not without logging into my non-existent Facebook account.)

Peter Bogdanovich. Ordinarily I would wait until tomorrow, but it looks like they had this one in the can. (And it has already been corrected once.) THR. Variety.

Before the end of the ’70s, however, Mr. Bogdanovich had been transformed from one of the most celebrated directors in Hollywood into one of the most ostracized. His career would be marred for years to come by critical and box-office failures, personal bankruptcies, the raking of his romantic life through the press and, as it all unspooled, an orgy of film-industry schadenfreude.
“It isn’t true that Hollywood is a bitter place, divided by hatred, greed and jealousy,” the director Billy Wilder once observed. “All it takes to bring the community together is a flop by Peter Bogdanovich.”

I wouldn’t mind seeing “Paper Moon”. I saw “What’s Up, Doc?” many many years ago, and would welcome seeing it again. And we’ve watched “Last Picture Show” recently. I’d also like to read those MoMA monographs.

Though Mr. Bogdanovich repeatedly disavowed the connection, critics liked to point out affinities between Welles’s career and his own: Both men began as directorial wunderkinds. (“Citizen Kane,” released in 1941, was Welles’s first full-length feature.) Both were later expelled from the Eden of A-list directors. (In the 1970s, a down-and-out Welles lived for a time in Mr. Bogdanovich’s mansion in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles.)

…

In the late 1990s, after declaring bankruptcy again, the down-and-out Mr. Bogdanovich lived for a time in the guesthouse of the young director Quentin Tarantino.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 6th, 2022 at 6:08 pm and is filed under Books, History, Movies, Obits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.