Tag Archives: spencer tracy

Spencer Tracy Was Kind of a Dick

“When Tracy won Best Actor for his turn in Captains Courageous in 1938, he was unable to attend the ceremony. MGM said he was recovering from a hernia, which was the 1940s way of saying ‘hospitalized for exhaustion,’ if you’re picking up what I’m putting down. The studio arranged for Tracy’s wife to accept the award in his stead, as a gesture towards the supposed strength of their marriage. With all the audience fully aware of how Tracy had neglected and mistreated her, Mrs. Tracy walked the stage. But the Academy had a sense of humor: the award was inscribed not to Spencer, but to Dick Tracy. ROUGH. MGM would periodically force Tracy to ‘dry out’ after massive benders — not out of kindness, but so that they could force him to do his next film. During this period, he was living at the Beverly Wilshire and constantly on the prowl — one MGM exec purportedly claimed that ‘No one gets more sex than Spencer Tracy…..except Joan Crawford.'” [ The Hairpin ]

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Spencer Tracy Was Kind of a Dick

‘The Script is Ruined, So the Movie is Ruined’: Michael Cristofer on The Bonfire of the Vanities at 20

Michael Cristofer is mostly known to recent audiences as the Corn Flakes-eating, conspiracy-plotting Truxton Spangler on the recently cancelled AMC series, Rubicon . What fans of Rubicon may not have realized is that Cristofer is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter who adapted Tom Wolfe’s bestselling novel The Bonfire of the Vanities for the screen — an adaptation, which, 20 years ago this week, became one of the biggest screen disasters of all time.

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‘The Script is Ruined, So the Movie is Ruined’: Michael Cristofer on The Bonfire of the Vanities at 20

12 Films of Christmas: Desk Set

This vintage Hollywood rom-com, listed as a holiday favorite in Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas , features one of American film’s most legendary couples: When efficiency expert Richard Sumner (Spencer Tracy) starts sniffing around the research department of the Federal Broadcasting Company TV network, the librarians naturally get suspicious. That department’s head, Bunny Watson (Katharine Hepburn), knows that Sumner is the inventor of an “electronic brain” called EMERAC, and she worries that if he installs one of his super-computers, she and research librarians Peg (Joan Blondell), Sylvia (Dina Merrill), and Ruthie (Sue Randall) will all be out of a job.

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12 Films of Christmas: Desk Set