It's the largest (and arguably most important) Roman Catholic cathedral in the U.S. It's on 5th Avenue, right across the street from Rockefeller Center and next to the Trump Tower. If you don't know St Patrick's, you probably don't know any other Catholic cathedral, either.TenPoundHammer wrote:Home Alone was surprisingly an 0-fer. Cathedrals also seemed pretty rough — what's so special about St. Patrick's Cathedral that I should instantly recognize it as NY?
Trivia: The real name of Pickford, and the 1940's Warner Bros. contract actress Alexis Smith, was Gladys Smith.TenPoundHammer wrote:No guess on FJ! NHO Mary Pickford, honestly.
Lucy was, indeed, the one who gave the final, and most critical, "green light" to Gene Roddenberry to film Star Trek's first pilot, The Cage. She didn't really "get" Star Trek's concept, but her gut said "yes." The rest is 23rd Century history.Paucle wrote:Knew'em both but said Lucy as an homage to Star Trek. Truth be told, without her, Trek probably never happens.
More trivia: Laurence Luckinbill, who played Mr Spock's brother, Cybok, in what's probably the worst Star Trek film ever, the William Shatner-directed Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, owes -- indirectly -- his paycheck for the movie to his mother-in-law: Lucille Ball.
For a studio to be considered to be "his" or "hers" (whoever the mogul in question might be), that person would have to have a controlling financial interest in the company. By that strict standard, Lucille Ball did have her own studio (Desilu, after ex-husband and partner Desi Arnaz sold her his share), but Pickford, no, since she was only one of four original partners (one of whom was her then-husband, Douglas Fairbanks); Sam Goldwyn later became UA's fifth partner. The controlling partner in David O. Selznick's studio (in several incarnations) was actually financier John Hay Whitney (whose sister, Joan Whitney Payson, would later found the New York Mets baseball team); Thalberg, and even Louis B. Mayer, were salaried employees answerable to Nicholas Schenck, chairman of parent company Loew's, Inc. (a publicly-traded company). They did hold equity stakes in the company but, as Mayer's 1951 ouster from the company he co-founded demonstrated, he, like Darryl Zanuck at Fox, served at the pleasure of others,Leah wrote:And Charlie Chaplin, and DW Griffith. Those were the artists who were united-- possible first invocation (by other studio heads) of lunatics running the asylum.alamble wrote:Co-founded with her husband, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Interesting to note that unlike Oprah, neither of the women referenced were solo proprietors of their studios.
But how many men were owners running their own studios? Hal Roach is one; there's an argument to be made for Zukor in the early Paramount years; Selznick at Selznick International. Maybe others. But even though there were heads of production (Zanuck at Fox, Thalberg at MGM etc.) who were the last word on greenlighting productions (and subsequently tinkering with them), those weren't "their" studios in the sense of ownership. But Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz actually bought her old movie studio (RKO) and transformed it into Desilu.