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Long ago I promised tireless B-movie fan Errol Thomas that I would write about my memories of Jeanne (also known as Jeannie and Jeanie) Bell. I worked with her on the blaxploitation classic TNT Jackson, and have never forgotten the experience

Most recently we’ve had an action comedy called The Heat, featuring Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy as buddy cops chasing down bad guys, while hilarity ensues. Suffice it to say that the film’s two mega-stars, sharing the screen for the first time, are Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, one playing a career criminal and the other the cop who has sworn to take him down. A guy told me one time, ‘Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.’ In the course of the film, De Niro’s character falls hard for the nice young woman played by Amy Brenneman, to the point where his solitary days seem on the brink of being over.

Such big-news events as the college admissions scandal and a whole string of campus shootings (leading to the recent suicides of two Parkland students in the aftermath of last year’s tragedy) chillingly remind us that today’s high schoolers are hardly immune to the problems of the adult world. But 2017’s Lady Bird was refreshing – and highly influential to my writing students – in that it sidesteps the big public catastrophes in favor of paying close attention to one lively but confused young girl as she transitions from high school senior to college freshman . The film follows Kayla through her final days of middle school, just before she’s en route to high school. To show the gulf that exists between her and high school seniors like Lady Bird, the script includes a scene in which the high school kids

Late in his career, Mamoulian had some notable Hollywood disasters: he was fired from the Technicolor film adaptation of Porgy and Bess after shooting only one scene, and later resigned from the notorious Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton Cleopatra. But I want to focus here on Mamoulian’s interaction with two of Broadway’s favorite sons, the musical team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Rodgers and Hart, who started out writing comic songs for the undergrads of Columbia University, became the toasts of the Great White Way via a long string of sparkling musical entertainments, with Rodgers responsible for music and Hart supplying the witty lyrics. But a younger Rodgers and Hart had been brought out to Hollywood circa 1932 to provide music for a Maurice Chevalier vehicle, Love Me Tonight, in which a romantically-inclined tailor falls in love with a princess (Jeanette MacDonald).