Day: October 23, 2021

Daily Best Bets

Best-bets for Oct. 25: CW has a debut and a season-opener

1) “4400”(shown here) debut, 9 p.m., CW. For a lawyer returning from maternity leave, this is a messy start: En route to work, she’s yanked up and dumped in a field, one of 4,400 perplexed souls there. For her, it’s suddenly 16 years later; for others, the time gap varies. This reboots a cable series, now focusing on Black characters. Like NBC’s “La Brea,” it’s a great concept, but has wildly overdrawn characters. But CW, unlike NBC, tends to finish what it starts; we might stick with this for a while. Read more…

By Mike Hughes / October 23, 2021
Stories

Movie mega-mogul went from gangsters to “Sound of Music”

Sometime, try to name the old-time movie moguls.
You might come up with the guys who put their names on studios – Disney, Warner, Goldwyn, Mayer. You probably wouldn’t say Darryl Zanuck, who may have topped them all in quantity and quality.
“He wasn’t a one-trick pony,” author/historian Scott Eyman said by phone. “The others found a groove and couldn’t get out of it.”
Eyman’s previous 15 books have ranged from John Wayne to Cecil B. DeMille. Now comes “20th Century-Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Creation of the Modern Film Studio” (Running Press). It traces Zanuck from gritty gangster films to the CinemaScope sprawl of “The Robe,” “The Sound of Music” (shown here) and beyond. “He sensed what the public was going to like before the public got there.” Read more…

By Mike Hughes / October 23, 2021