I'll admit I'd never heard of Manlio Rocchetti, who died at the beginning of the week aged 73. That's because he was a makeup artist, the sort of behind-the-scenes person who doesn't get any recognition in a broader sense. Well, there are the Oscars, of course, and Rocchetti won one of those for his work on Driving Miss Daisy. (Are the make-up Oscars still presented in the main ceremony, or in the technical awards ceremony? I don't watch the Oscars.) The lack of recognition is, I think, highlighted by the fact that I couldn't find any good English-language obituaries. That having been said, the Italian obituary I linked to shows Rocchetti working with Daniel Day-Lewis on the set of Gangs of New York.
William Peter Blatty died on Thursday at the age of 89. He'll probably be best remembered for writing The Exorcist, but he also did several screenplays. Not only for the movie version of The Exorcist, but also for A Shot in the Dark and the execrable John Goldfarb, Please Come Home. I'd guess it was Blatty's time working for the US Information Agency in Beirut that gave him the idea for the last of those movies. That time also gave him an in to appear on Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life:
Noirsville Noir Art
24 minutes ago
1 comment:
Just saw John Goldfarb for the first time a couple of weeks ago. It was painfully bad, nearly unwatchable. Seems incredible that the same person who wrote The Exorcist could be responsible for that awful pile. But looking at his credits he wrote a few other things that were okay so maybe he was having an off day.
Post a Comment