Housekeeping: Blog Posts I've Started And Never Finished (And Likely Never Will)

I worked pretty hard in July and August, not only on a series of posts about 1917 (which I am finishing up this week) but also on some unrelated posts participating in other bloggers' blogathons—"Cary Grant Has A Cold" inspired by Monty's blog All Good Things, a post for the Thrilling Days of Yesteryear Dick Van Dyke blogathon, cued up and ready for the show's 50th anniversary on October 3, and a long post about Carole Lombard's silent film career for the Carole-tennial+3 celebration of that great star's 103rd birthday (October 6).

Then I got distracted for a while. We had new carpet installed, bought a new dryer and began to interview roofers. And I sprained my left ankle, and as soon as that was healed, sprained my right foot. Seems like there were other things as well.

Anyway, I started a number of blog posts that I never finished and likely never will, much to my chagrin. Here they are, all bundled up with no place to go.

Many Many Thanks
Sophie of Waitin' On A Sunny Day has awarded me the Liebster Blogger Award.

"MM's blog was one of the first I ever followed and it's thanks to him that I've watched many silent films that I might not have otherwise - thank you! :D You should all go over there and follow him immediately!"

Wow. Thanks Sophie! That's pretty much the ultimate compliment for a film blogger ...

By the way, she's hosting the "Darling Deborah Blogathon" on September 30 in honor of Deborah Kerr's 90th birthday. If I can get my act together, I'll try to post something, Deborah Kerr being one of my favorite actresses. Maybe "Deborah Kerr Has A Cold" ...

Where Do All The Bloggers Go
I was cleaning up links on my blog last week, deleting the ones that no longer go anywhere, and I got to wondering what had become of some of the people who used to stop by and now have disappeared—not just from the comments section of this blog, which considering the erratic content here is understandable, but from their own blogs, and apparently from face of the earth ...

Note: there were two in particular I was thinking of, Gordon Pasha of Lazlo's on Lex, a great blog about growing up in New York City, and Ginger Ingenue of Asleep in New York, a blog dedicated to movies and insomnia.

Gordon, I was sad to learn recently, passed away in August. He will be missed.

As for Ginger Ingenue, one hopes she's still out there somewhere, not sleeping through the night. If you read this, Ginger, drop us a line.

Gravity
"Being big and thus prone to falling hard, my relationship with gravity has always been, at best, adversarial."

Something I tell Katie-Bar-The-Door all the time, but she's small and continues to court disaster.

Krazy Kat
(By the way, Paul J. Marasa of The Constant Viewer offers an explanation for why Dressler and Chaplin hit each other with bricks early in Tillie's Punctured Romance—the comic strip Krazy Kat had debuted a year earlier, and if you know your hundred year old comic strips, you know Ignatz the mouse frequently brained the lovestruck Kat with a brick.) (Me, I read Jay Cantor's novel based on the strip some twenty-plus years ago.)


Actor-Proof Parts
I have to confess that the other day, when I passed on the TCM trivia question about Maggie McNamara and her Oscar-nominated first role, not only had I never seen The Moon Is Blue, I'd never even heard of Maggie McNamara. But fortunately, TCM was showing it that very afternoon and I watched it, which I suppose was the point of the question, to lure in the curious.

Directed by Otto Preminger, The Moon Is Blue was a romantic comedy starring William Holden, David Niven and the aforementioned McNamara. ... It was stage-bound and although cutting-edge for its day—they used words like "seduction" and "virgin" right out loud in open defiance of the Production Code—it's hopelessly dated now, and while Maggie McNamara in a brunette pony-tail kind of reminded me of Audrey Hepburn, she brings none of Hepburn's spark to the role. All-in-all, pleasant but forgettable.

Still, McNamara wound up with an Oscar nomination for best actress, in a year when Gloria Grahame (The Big Heat), Jean Arthur (Shane), and Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe (both for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) received none. And I had to wonder why. The Moon Is Blue was McNamara's first movie, and she only made four more—her career hit the skids almost immediately afterwards, I imagine when people discovered she couldn't act, not really. (She wound up making ends meet as a typist and committed suicide in 1978 at the age of forty-eight.)

Here's A Blog I Should Follow
I was looking for photos of Roscoe Arbuckle the other day when I stumbled across a really good one on the internet, which I promptly downloaded, and then I thought "this is a good blog, I should follow it," so I scrolled up to the top of the page to find its name:

"A Mythical Monkey Writes About The Movies"

Turns out I had posted the photo back in June. Wah wah wah. Still, it's good to know that if I weren't already a raging narcissist, I would find something to like about myself.

Today's Oscar Trivia #2

I cannot tell a lie: The questions are ripped off straight from TCM's Now Playing magazine.

As was the case yesterday, no prizes for being smart. Just like in real life.

Love At First Sight Several women have been nominated for acting Oscars in their film debuts. What 1953 comedy did the trick for Maggie McNamara?

Most Nominated Actor Who is the most nominated actor in Academy history, with 12 nominations that included three wins?

Husbands And Wives Three times husband and wife have been nominated as actors in the same film. For what 1957 mystery did Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester win their nominations?