{"id":18062,"date":"2010-02-15T09:48:08","date_gmt":"2010-02-15T14:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/?p=18062"},"modified":"2015-01-19T22:50:03","modified_gmt":"2015-01-20T03:50:03","slug":"how-many-of-hollywoods-1954-dead-can-you-recognize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2010\/02\/15\/how-many-of-hollywoods-1954-dead-can-you-recognize\/","title":{"rendered":"How Many of Hollywood’s 1954 Dead Can You<\/i> Recognize?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maybe I’m morbid, but my favorite minutes of Oscar night are probably when the In Memoriam montage screens. It brings back memories of those we’ve lost, those we will never forget, those we feel could not possibly ever be forgotten. With a few tiny snippets, whole lives, entire careers, come flooding back in my memory.<\/p>\n

Here, for example, is what the Academy put together last year:<\/p>\n

<\/param><\/param><\/param><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

We’ll never forget them, right? Audiences 50 years from now will of course still remember Charlton Heston and Paul Newman! Well, don’t be so sure. <\/p>\n

Take a look at this list of the dead published in The 1955 Film Daily Year Book of Motion Pictures<\/i>. Off the top of your head, without doing an online search, how many of these notables can you place?<\/p>\n

\"Necrology1954\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I could only confidently remember five, and a couple of those I wasn’t entirely sure why. I’m now going to hold myself open for public humiliation by letting you know exactly which ones.<\/p>\n

I remembered:<\/p>\n

Sydney Greenstreet:<\/b> This is the easiest one on the list. Thanks to Casablanca<\/i> and The Maltese Falcon<\/i>, he’s most famous name here, though not the most influential.<\/p>\n

Will H. Hays:<\/b> The man after whom Hollywood’s censorship guidelines were named. Well, not technically. But they became known as the Hays code thanks to his fame.<\/p>\n

Dr. Auguste Lumiere:<\/b> One of two early filmmaker brothers who made movies at the end of the 19th century. <\/p>\n

Irving Pichel:<\/b> I remembered he was an actor and director, but even though I could recall his face and voice, I couldn’t remember why. Turns out he directed Destination Moon<\/i> and was Fagin in an early film version of Oliver Twist<\/i>. So I don’t think I get full credit for this one.<\/p>\n

Judge Augustus Hand:<\/b> I recognized the name, but again, I wasn’t sure why. Turns out he’s the judge who ruled that James Joyce’s Ulysses<\/i> was not obscene. But it seems what got him on the list was his role in the case United States v. Paramount Pictures<\/i>, which made it illegal for distributors to collude with movie theaters in price fixing.<\/p>\n

Grantland Rice:<\/b> I remembered him as a famous sports writer, though I couldn’t give you any details. Turns out he’s the one who applied the phrase the “Four Horsemen” to the 1924 Notre Dame football team. He also published poetry, including a poem with the stanza:<\/p>\n

“For when the One Great Scorer comes
\nTo write against your name,
\nHe marks—not that you won or lost—
\nBut how you played the Game.”<\/p>\n

I’m still not sure how that gets him on a Hollywood-themed list, though.<\/p>\n

Those five are the only ones I could place. And the rest, no matter how memorable they were when they passed in 1954, no matter how great their fame or how remarkable their accomplishments, are mist and fog to me.<\/p>\n

So now it’s your turn. Go ahead. Humiliate me. How many could you<\/i> remember?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maybe I’m morbid, but my favorite minutes of Oscar night are probably when the In Memoriam montage screens. It brings back memories of those we’ve lost, those we will never forget, those we feel could not possibly ever be forgotten. With a few tiny snippets, whole lives, entire careers, come flooding back in my memory. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18062"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18064,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18062\/revisions\/18064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}