Rita Lakin, the boundary-pushing TV writer and showrunner who worked on Peyton Place, The Doctors and Mod Squad and created series including The Rookies and Flamingo Road, has died. She was 93.
Lakin died March 23 of natural causes at an assisted living facility in Novato, California, her son, writer-producer Howard Lakin, told The Hollywood Reporter. “Before her, they hadn’t thought about writing television from a woman’s point of view,” he noted.
Lakin also penned a groundbreaking 1975 episode of CBS’ Medical Center centered on a transgender character; served as a showrunner/executive producer on the 1976-77 CBS drama Executive Suite; and wrote such popular telefilms as 1971’s Death Takes a Holiday and 1973’s Message to My Daughter and A Summer Without Boys.
After she met some people from Texas whom she didn’t like, she rejected an offer in 1978 to create the pilot for a show about an oil family in the Lone Star State.
Lakin died March 23 of natural causes at an assisted living facility in Novato, California, her son, writer-producer Howard Lakin, told The Hollywood Reporter. “Before her, they hadn’t thought about writing television from a woman’s point of view,” he noted.
Lakin also penned a groundbreaking 1975 episode of CBS’ Medical Center centered on a transgender character; served as a showrunner/executive producer on the 1976-77 CBS drama Executive Suite; and wrote such popular telefilms as 1971’s Death Takes a Holiday and 1973’s Message to My Daughter and A Summer Without Boys.
After she met some people from Texas whom she didn’t like, she rejected an offer in 1978 to create the pilot for a show about an oil family in the Lone Star State.
- 4/21/2023
- by Mike Barnes
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
More than one feature film looks at the making of this picture, focusing on its author, Truman Capote. Criterion's disc returns the discussion to Richard Brooks, the director that dared adapt an unfilmable novel of lurid, unthinkable crime on the Kansas prairie. It's also a last gasp of artistic B&W cinematography from Hollywood, thanks to the indelible images of Conrad Hall. In Cold Blood Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 781 1967 / B&W / 2:35 widescreen / 134 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date November 20, 2015 / 39.95 Starring Robert Blake, Scott Wilson, John Forsythe, Paul Stewart, Gerald S. O'Loughlin, Jeff Corey, John Gallaudet, James Flavin, John Collins, Charles McGraw, Will Geer. Cinematography Conrad L. Hall Production Designer Robert F. Boyle Film Editor Peter Zinner Original Music Quincy Jones Written by Richard Brooks from the novel by Truman Capote Produced and Directed by Richard Brooks
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Some directors just want to work. Others...
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Some directors just want to work. Others...
- 11/21/2015
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
'A Hatful of Rain' with Lloyd Nolan, Anthony Franciosa and Don Murray 'A Hatful of Rain' script fails to find cinematic voice as most of the cast hams it up Based on a play by Michael V. Gazzo, A Hatful of Rain is an interesting attempt at injecting "adult" subject matters – in this case, the evils of drug addiction – into Hollywood movies. "Interesting," however, does not mean either successful or compelling. Despite real, unromantic New York City locations and Joseph MacDonald's beautifully realistic black-and-white camera work (and the pointless use of CinemaScope), this Fred Zinnemann-directed melodrama feels anachronistically stagy as a result of its artificial dialogue and the hammy theatricality of its performers – with Eva Marie Saint as the sole naturalistic exception. 'A Hatful of Rain' synopsis Somewhat revolutionary in its day (Otto Preminger's The Man with a Golden Arm,* also about drug addiction,...
- 5/11/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
The Movie Pool rounds up the usual suspects to take in the 1950s drama Cop Hater on DVD!
DVD Specs
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 enhanced for widescreen TVs
Running Time: 75 minutes
Rating: Not rated
Audio: Dolby Digital 2.0 mono
Subtitles: None
Special Features: Trailer
The DVD is offered as part of MGM's "Limited Edition Collection" on DVD, which are available from select online retailers and are manufactured only when the DVD is ordered. The DVD features a simple menu with no menu for chapters or scenes. Chapters are set every ten minutes. Manufacture-On-Demand (Mod) DVDs will play in DVD playback units only and may not play in DVD recorders or PC drives. This DVD did not play in our laptop DVD drive but did play in our Toshiba DVD recorder.
The Set-up
A dedicated cop (Robert Loggia) tries to hunt down a cop killer during a hot summer in New York City.
DVD Specs
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 enhanced for widescreen TVs
Running Time: 75 minutes
Rating: Not rated
Audio: Dolby Digital 2.0 mono
Subtitles: None
Special Features: Trailer
The DVD is offered as part of MGM's "Limited Edition Collection" on DVD, which are available from select online retailers and are manufactured only when the DVD is ordered. The DVD features a simple menu with no menu for chapters or scenes. Chapters are set every ten minutes. Manufacture-On-Demand (Mod) DVDs will play in DVD playback units only and may not play in DVD recorders or PC drives. This DVD did not play in our laptop DVD drive but did play in our Toshiba DVD recorder.
The Set-up
A dedicated cop (Robert Loggia) tries to hunt down a cop killer during a hot summer in New York City.
- 5/5/2011
- Cinelinx
Riot (1969) Direction: Buzz Kulik Cast: Jim Brown, Gene Hackman, Mike Kellin, Gerald S. O'Loughlin, Clifford David, Ben Carruthers, Frank Eyman Screenplay: James Poe; from Frank Elli's novel "A protest, a riot, I don't care what you call it," says Red (Gene Hackman), the mastermind of an audacious plan to break out of an Arizona prison in the 1969 release Riot, produced by William Castle, directed by Buzz Kulik (Brian's Song), and adapted by James Poe (They Shoot Horses, Don't They?) from Frank Elli's novel. [Note: Spoilers ahead.] Red and a small crew of fellow criminals — an ad hoc and suitably diverse bunch from the solitary confinement wing, including wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time protagonist Cully Briston (Jim Brown) — instigate an uprising among the other inmates, hoping to distract the authorities with their seemingly serious demands while they plot to sneak out through a tunnel under the prison auditorium. This line seems to betray a [...]...
- 3/2/2011
- by Dan Erdman
- Alt Film Guide
By Michael Atkinson
Malian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako may have made the one African film everybody needs to see . at least for its disarming fugue of frank political awareness and state-of-the-quotidian African life. In most other ways, though, "Bamako" (2006) is a challenge to orthodoxy, because it's not driven by its narrative, and hardly even provides an establishing context for itself. Before we know it, we're in a sun-dappled Mali courtyard (Sissako's family home, as it turns out), in which a kind of tribunal is going on, complete with black-robed jurists, waiting witnesses, anxious journalists and stacks of documentation. This is, we slowly realize, a fantasy trial in which the African people have taken civil proceedings against the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and American-led global capitalism in general, for the crime of exploiting and loan-sharking the continent and its peoples. The testimony is not from actors, but from real African citizens,...
Malian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako may have made the one African film everybody needs to see . at least for its disarming fugue of frank political awareness and state-of-the-quotidian African life. In most other ways, though, "Bamako" (2006) is a challenge to orthodoxy, because it's not driven by its narrative, and hardly even provides an establishing context for itself. Before we know it, we're in a sun-dappled Mali courtyard (Sissako's family home, as it turns out), in which a kind of tribunal is going on, complete with black-robed jurists, waiting witnesses, anxious journalists and stacks of documentation. This is, we slowly realize, a fantasy trial in which the African people have taken civil proceedings against the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and American-led global capitalism in general, for the crime of exploiting and loan-sharking the continent and its peoples. The testimony is not from actors, but from real African citizens,...
- 5/6/2008
- by Michael Atkinson
- ifc.com
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