The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1968)

Question: Is anybody other than me enjoying this daily edition of the Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards?

I ask because come Friday I can either keep going with the 1970s, or I can stop and begin promoting Monty's March Madness Best Actress Tournament—the Monkey is hosting the Silent Era/1930s bracket (with voting to begin on March 5).

Either way, you will get a daily dose of your favorite stars' photos. They'll just either have names like Jane Fonda, Gene Hackman and Al Pacino, or Mary Pickford, Carole Lombard and Irene Dunne.

It's up to you.

PICTURE (Drama)
winner: 2001: A Space Odyssey (prod. Stanley Kubrick)
nominees: Faces (prod. Maurice McEndree and John Cassavetes); The Lion in Winter (prod. Martin Poll); Night of the Living Dead (prod. Karl Hardman and Russell Streiner); Planet of the Apes (Arthur P. Jacobs); Rosemary's Baby (prod. William Castle); Targets (prod. Peter Bogdanovich)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: The Producers (prod. Sidney Glazier)
nominees: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (prod. Albert R. Broccoli); The Odd Couple (prod. Howard W. Koch); Oliver! (prod. John Woolf); Pretty Poison (prod. Marshall Backlar and Joel Black); Yellow Submarine (prod. Al Brodax)

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: C'era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West) (prod. Fulvio Morsella)
nominees: Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses) (prod. Marcel Berbert and François Truffaut); Il grande silenzio (The Great Silence) (prod. Adelphia Compagnia Cinematografica and Les Films Corona); Skammen (Shame) (prod. Lars-Owe Carlberg)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Steve McQueen (Bullitt)
nominees: Tony Curtis (The Boston Strangler); Charlton Heston (Planet of the Apes and Will Penny); Peter O’Toole (The Lion in Winter); Cliff Robertson (Charly); Max von Sydow (Skammen a.k.a. Shame)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Zero Mostel (The Producers)
nominees: Dean Jones (The Love Bug); Jack Lemmon (The Odd Couple); Walter Matthau (The Odd Couple); Ron Moody (Oliver!); Peter Sellers (The Party)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Katharine Hepburn (The Lion in Winter)
nominees: Claudia Cardinale (C'era una volta il West a.k.a. Once Upon a Time in the West); Julie Christie (Petulia); Mia Farrow (Rosemary's Baby); Gena Rowland (Faces); Liv Ullmann (Skammen a.k.a. Shame); Joanne Woodward (Rachel, Rachel)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Tuesday Weld (Pretty Poison)
nominees: Julie Andrews (Star!); Jane Fonda (Barbarella); Sally Ann Howes (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang); Barbara Streisand (Funny Girl)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey)
nominees: Ingmar Bergman (Skammen a.k.a. Shame); John Cassavetes (Faces); Sergio Leone (C'era una volta il West a.k.a. Once Upon a Time in the West); Roman Polanski (Rosemary's Baby); George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Mel Brooks (The Producers)
nominees: Carol Reed (Oliver!)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Henry Fonda (C'era una volta il West a.k.a. Once Upon a Time in the West)
nominees: Jack Albertson (The Subject Was Roses); Anthony Hopkins (The Lion in Winter); Boris Karloff (Targets); Kenneth Mars (The Producers); Roddy McDowell (Planet of the Apes); Oliver Reed (Oliver!); Jason Robards (C'era una volta il West a.k.a. Once Upon a Time in the West); Gene Wilder (The Producers)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Ruth Gordon (Rosemary's Baby)
nominees: Lynn Carlin (Faces); Kim Hunter (Planet of the Apes); Sondra Locke (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter); Estelle Parsons (Rachel, Rachel); Delphine Seyrig (Baisers volés a.k.a. Stolen Kisses); Estelle Winwood (The Producers)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Sergio Leone and Sergio Donati (screenplay), from a story by Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci and Sergio Leone, English translation by Mickey Knox (C'era una volta il West a.k.a. Once Upon a Time in the West)
nominees: John Cassavetes (Faces); James Goldman, from his play (The Lion in Winter); Neil Simon, from his play (The Odd Couple); Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, from the novel by Pierre Boulle (Planet of the Apes); Mel Brooks (The Producers); Roman Polanski, from the novel by Ira Levin (Rosemary's Baby); Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey)

SPECIAL AWARDS
"Springtime for Hitler" (The Producers) music and lyrics by Mel Brooks (Song); Ennio Morricone (C'era una volta il West a.k.a. Once Upon a Time in the West) (score); Claudio Maielli, Elio Pacella and Fausto Ancillai (C'era una volta il West a.k.a. Once Upon a Time in the West) (Sound); Anthony Masters, Harry Lange and Ernest Archer (2001: A Space Odyssey) (Art Direction-Set Decoration); Ray Lovejoy (2001: A Space Odyssey) (Film Editing); Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey) (Special Effects); William A. Fraker (Bullitt) (Cinematography); John Chambers (Planet of the Apes) (Make-up); Morton Haack (Planet of the Apes) (Costumes); Yellow Submarine (Animated Feature); Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (Animated Short)

Buster Keaton's Pie Recipe

An excerpt from my upcoming essay about early silent film comedy.

It's impossible to say with any certainty who invented the pie-in-the-face gag so much associated with silent film comedy. The pie itself was probably invented by the ancient Egyptians during the Neolithic Period, around 9500 B.C. and my best guess is that the first pie was thrown for laughs somewhere around 9500-and-ten-minutes B.C. The tomb of pharaoh Ramses II, who took power in 1304 B.C., included etchings of royal bakers preparing galettes, a thin-crusted pie stuffed with honey and nuts—maybe the first artistic representation of a pie in history.

Legend has it that Mabel Normand threw motion pictures' first pie, hitting an unsuspecting Roscoe Arbuckle in the short A Noise From The Deep (1913). The fact is though, it was the otherwise forgettable Mr. Flip (1909) starring veteran comic Ben Turpin that was the first film to feature an actor getting hit in the face with a pie. Famous for his crossed eyes and brush moustache, Turpin began his career in burlesque and vaudeville before making his film debut in 1907 at the Essanay Studios. Mr. Flip has all the appearances of being based on a stage routine Turpin had earlier perfected, leading me to believe that the pie-in-the-face gag was already an old one by the time it showed up on film.



Still, there are historians who insist Normand should get credit for throwing the first pie (as opposed to merely shoving it into the victim's face). Well, maybe. Even that much is hard to confirm. I've read that Normand in fact threw the first pie at a stagehand who had made a pass at her, and that the story has morphed over time into credit for inventing the thrown-pie gag. I've also read that it wasn't Normand who threw the pie at all but Arbuckle himself and that he hit co-star Nick Cogley. A copy of A Noise From The Deep resides in New York's Museum of Modern Art where it is screened periodically. If I ever see it, I'll let you know the scoop.

For those interested in the fine art of pie throwing, Buster Keaton described the process in some detail in an interview with Fletcher Markle in 1964:

"[N]umber one is we don't use a regular baker's pie," he told Markle, "and throwing the pie in a cardboard plate is no good because that plate flying off detracts. So, what we used to do is our prop man would get our baker—whoever is closest to the studio—to make pie crust, two of them, with nothing in them, and take just a little flour and water to make a paste, just enough to glue the two together. That was so that your fingers wouldn't go through the bottom of it. Now you fill it, about an inch, with just flour and water mixed, which clings like glue and stretches. Now, on top of it, if I'm going to hit somebody in dark clothes, a brunette, you put a lemon meringue type of topping on it and garnish with whipped cream, you see. When it was a light costume, a blond, something like that, you put in blueberry, and then enough whipped cream just to splatter.

"Then when you threw the pie, you shot put up to a distance of about eight feet. But from there on back, you brought that pie from here [points to shoulder] right overhand, 'cause with a little practice you can learn to make that pie come in this way [vertically] and not crossways." The better to maximize the splatter, he said.

Keaton was credited with once hitting a movie villain "plum in the pus" from a distance of twenty-seven feet.

The pie-in-the-face gag became passé around the same time comics such as Chaplin and Keaton began making feature films. "[T]he minute we got into features," Keaton said, "where an audience had to believe the story we were telling, we had to stop pie-throwing. There was never a pie thrown in any of our pictures once we started into features. No impossible gags were done."

The Three Stooges later revived the art of the pie fight in such shorts as In the Sweet Pie and Pie, and Mel Brooks staged one of the best known pie fights in Blazing Saddles. And then serious film fanatics are aware of the pie-fight-that-wasn't that was originally to end Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The fight was to have broken out in the war room and the sequence was filmed, but Kubrick later decided to delete it. If you look closely though you can still see the pies when the Russian ambassador partakes of the war room's lavish buffet.

Today's Oscar Trivia #11

Any Regrets? Many times in film history, actors and actresses have turned down parts that went on to earn the eventual taker an Oscar nomination. Doris Day famously turned down a role in which 1967 satire that brought a nomination to Anne Bancroft?

Brother and Sister Acts Who are the only brother and sister to each win an acting Oscar? (Hint: His was for the 1931 A Free Soul, hers for the 1944 None But The Lonely Heart.)

You can check out TCM's entire "31 Days of Oscar" schedule here.