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1-11 of 11
- Writer
- Producer
- Additional Crew
Fred Freiberger was born and raised in New York's Bronx. For a while, he worked in advertising. During World War II he joined the 8th Air Force as a navigator, was shot down and spent 22 months as a POW in Germany. Upon his repatriation he briefly studied at the Institute of Film at Pace University and eventually made his way to Hollywood on his Air Force back pay. Hoping to obtain a job as a publicist, Freiberger found himself sidelined by an industry strike, remaining unemployed and without funds. While waiting for the strike to be resolved he began to write. He managed to sell his first story to Comet Productions which was owned by Mary Pickford. This was followed by his first science-fiction effort for an anthology TV series, The Clock (1949). Free-lancing during the next few years, he co-wrote the script for the cult classic The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and developed the original story for a superior outdoor western, Garden of Evil (1954), which starred Gary Cooper and Susan Hayward. During the next ten years, Freiberger became one of the most prolific writers of western teleplays in the business, working on such popular fare as Cheyenne (1955), Rawhide (1959) and Laramie (1959).
Freiberger's first significant contribution to science fiction was as producer of The Wild Wild West (1965), for which he was brought in to devise ingenious cliffhangers and off-beat futuristic gadgets. This necessitated bigger budgets and brought about creative clashes with CBS executives who failed to grasp the show's concept. Freiberger was sacked after ten episodes. Because of a planned European vacation, he then spurned an offer by Gene Roddenberry to produce Star Trek (1966) from the onset. However, in 1968, he took up the option to produce the show in its final season. By then, severe budgetary cuts (which resulted in many 'bottle show' episodes and lower quality scripts), the exodus of top creative talent and the take-over of Desilu by Paramount all had detrimental effects on a series which (despite its ever-loyal following) had not seen an increase in ratings since season one. Freiberger often butted heads with writers and directors and was criticised for overemphasizing action at the expense of character development. In the end, many people laid blame for the cancellation of "Star Trek" firmly at Freiberger's feet. Not everybody, including William Shatner and Robert H. Justman, agreed. Moreover, NBC's unreasonable re-slotting of "Star Trek" to the Friday 'hour of death' (10 P.M.) was definitely a chief contributing factor to the show's demise.
After "Star Trek", Freiberger managed to get Space: 1999 (1975) to be picked up for a second season. He created new characters (dashing Tony Verdeschi and shape-shifting Maya, played by Catherine Schell) in an effort to boost ratings. He also penned three episodes himself under nom de plume Charles Woodgrove. However, the series did not survive and Freiberger's subsequent unhappy association with the final season of The Six Million Dollar Man (1974) put him again in the public mind as a scapegoat, earning him in some quarters the unkind, and certainly undeserved sobriquet 'the series killer'.
The first interracial kiss on U.S. television (between Kirk and Uhura in the episode "Plato's Stepchildren") took place on his watch, though the praise went to Roddenberry who was not in any way associated with the episode.- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Hank Ballard grew up singing gospel in church in his hometown of Bessemer, Alabama. He had always wanted to sing professionally, and at 16 years of age got a chance to do it when he took over a group called The Royals, which had been organized in 1950 (and among whose original members were Levi Stubbs and Jackie Wilson). Ballard replaced one of the group's singers and immediately began to shift its style from that of smooth, harmonic pop melodies to a grittier R&B-edged, gospel-influenced - and at times quite suggestive - pop style. Their first hit was in 1953 with "Get It," and they had another, bigger hit the next year (by which time they had changed their names to The Midnighters to avoid being confused with another group, The Five Royals) with "Work With Me, Annie", a song that took a lot of heat from religious pressure groups because of its perceived "suggestive" lyrics and was banned from play on many radio stations. Their career stayed on track for another 18 months with several more hit records, but then their popularity began to wane and they didn't have another hit for more than three years. During that time there were numerous personnel changes in the group, and their record company, Federal Records, seemed to be backing away from them and toward a group it had just signed, The Famous Flames, headed by a shouting, hard-charging singer named James Brown. In 1958 Ballard left Federal for VeeJay Records and there he recorded a song he had written, called "The Twist." VeeJay decided not to release it, but King Records--which owned VeeJay--signed the group away from that label and had them rerecord "The Twist" (it was on that record that the group was first billed as "Hank Ballard and the Midnighters" rather than just "The Midnighters", as they had been previously), but released it as the B-side of a ballad called "Teardrops On Your Letter". That song hit #4 on the R&B charts, but "The Twist" also started to get some recognition and airplay. Dick Clark, host of the teenage music/dance show American Bandstand (1952) (aka "American Bandstand"), took a liking to the song and had it recorded by a Philadelphia singer named Ernest Evans (renamed Chubby Checker--a play on R&B legend Fats Domino--by Clark's wife). Checker's version of the song zoomed to the #1 spot in 1960 and started a national "Twist" craze (in an unusual move, it was released again in 1962 and once more soared to the #1 spot). Ballard, rather than resenting Checker's success with his song, decided to capitalize on it and within a few months of the release of Checker's song had three hits in the top 40: "Finger Poppin' Time" (considered by many to be the quintessential Ballard/Midnighters song), "Let's Go, Let's Go, Let's Go" and the group's original version of "The Twist." However, by late 1961 the twist craze began to wane, as did Ballard & the Midnighters' record successes, and the group broke up. Ballard continued his career for the next 20 years, sometimes as a solo act and sometimes with different versions of The Midnighters. In 1990 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.- Producer
- Director
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Bill Carruthers was born on 27 September 1930 in Detroit, Michigan, USA. He was a producer and director, known for Press Your Luck (1983), The 7th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards (1980) and The 9th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards (1982). He died on 2 March 2003 in Burbank, California, USA.- Composer
- Writer
- Music Department
Malcolm Williamson was born on 21 November 1931 in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. He was a composer and writer, known for The Matrix Reloaded (2003), Watership Down (1978) and Nothing But the Night (1973). He was married to Dolores Daniel. He died on 2 March 2003 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK.- Music Department
- Composer
- Soundtrack
William Blezard, was best known as piano accompanist for such leading stage figures as Joyce Grenfell, Marlene Dietrich and Honor Blackman. He was also a composer of note, particularly of theatre and film music. Born in Padiham, near Burnley, he was the son of mill workers, and his tenor father sang semi-professionally. William showed talent, initially on the harmonium, and subsequently on the piano, which he played in the local cinema. A mill owner, Teddy Higham, paid for William to have piano lessons until, in 1938, he won a Lancashire County scholarship, leaving Clitheroe Royal grammar school, where he had already performed Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue, to go to the Royal College of Music (RCM) in London.
His studies were interrupted in 1940 by war service in the RAF as a Morse code operator in Wick, but he soon found access to a piano and continued to study and compose. On his return to the RCM in 1946, he studied piano with Arthur Benjamin and Frank Merrick, composition with Herbert Howells, and orchestration with Gordon Jacobs. He won the prestigious Cobbett Prize, for Fantasy String Quartet.
This resulted in Muir Mathieson inviting him to work at Denham Studios as a composer and arranger for documentaries. He arranged and orchestrated Noël Coward's music for the film of his play The Astonished Heart (1949).
Through his wife-to-be, the conductor and teacher Joan Kemp Potter, William met the pianist Donald Swann, and it was through Swann that he met Joyce Grenfell. His participation in Joyce Grenfell Requests The Pleasure started in 1954, and he remained her accompanist throughout her career, including several BBC broadcasts, four world tours and her last performance, for the royal family at Windsor Castle in June 1973. William contributed, with relish, The Battle March Of Delhi, a Victorian parlour song.
As composer and musical director, William had an illustrious career in the theatre. In 1957, he worked on two Royal Shakespeare Company productions with Peter Brook, Titus Andronicus and The Tempest. In the same year, he became musical director of John Osborne's The Entertainer, with Laurence Olivier as the failed music-hall artist Archie Rice. William fulfilled the same role for the Max Wall revival in 1974, and this led to William's involvement in the solo show Aspects Of Max Wall.
In 1965, William took over from Burt Bacharach as Marlene Dietrich's accompanist and musical director. With typical modesty, William always maintained that he landed the job because he had the correct zodiac sign. They gave three world tours, ending in 1975 when Dietrich broke her leg on stage in Sydney - it was her final performance.
William was also musical director for the show that Sheridan Morley wrote and narrated about Coward and Gertrude Lawrence, Noël And Gertie, and worked with Joanna Lumley, Ian Ogilvy, Patricia Hodge and Maria Aitken. In the 1980s, he started a long-running partnership with Honor Blackman, in her one-woman shows, Yvette and Dishonourable Ladies. In 1990, he played for the first of many performances of Tim Heath's Not Yet The Dodo, based on Coward's poem.
His gifts as an improviser were on display in the BBC television children's programme Play School from 1964 onwards. Often he was called on to provide, at the drop of a hat, what presenter Johnny Ball called "onomatopoeic music", music to evoke running water or splashing in puddles.
In later life, William was gratified to see several of his works performed. The Royal Ballet Sinfonia recorded his Battersea Park Suite, Caramba, The River and Duetto For Strings; the oboist Jill Crowther and the English Northern Philharmonia his Two Celtic Pieces; and Eric Parkin two CDs of his piano music. He was a Francophile who admired the music of Ravel, echoes of which can be heard in his own; he liked travelling abroad in general, and had an aptitude for languages.
Paradoxically, away from the piano, he was renowned for being clumsy and spatially unaware. He considered that inanimate objects conspired against him, and would often greet me at the door with a glum pronouncement of that day's score, "Inanimate objects three - Blezard nil."
Right up until his death William was performing, and could be seen bicycling around Barnes. His wife predeceased him in 2001, and he was survived by his son Paul and daughter Pookie.- Composer
- Music Department
Acclaimed as the most significant Italian composer of the mid-20th century (along with Luigi Dallapiccola), Goffredo Petrassi was born in Zagarolo in 1904, the son of Elissio and Erminia Petrassi. He didn't begin scoring Italian documentary films until the 1940s; unfortunately, his massive output of classical works and teaching commitments left time to score only ten movies (six features and four shorts).
Petrassi rather regretted this meagre output and called his work for the cinema "un amore non corrisposto," an unrequited love. His film scores became something of a rare treat for cinema-goers, particularly the memorable feature scores. The four rarely-seen shorts were entitled, for the record, Musica nel Tempo (1941), Creazione del Mondo (1947), Lezione di Geometria (1948) and La Porta di San Pietro di Giacomo Manzu (1964).
Although Petrassi lived to 98, his output stopped some 20 years before, and sadly for the last 10 years of his life he was essentially blind.- Visual Effects
- Sound Department
Robert B. Ingebretsen was born on 30 March 1948 in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. Robert B. is known for A Computer Animated Hand (1972). Robert B. died on 2 March 2003 in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.- Jenner Augusto was born on 11 November 1924 in Aracaju, Sergipe, Brazil. He was an actor, known for Tenda dos Milagres (1977) and Bahia Por Exemplo (1971). He died on 2 March 2003 in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.
- Art Director
- Art Department
- Production Designer
Robert Randolph was born on 9 March 1926 in Centerville, Iowa, USA. He was an art director and production designer, known for That's Life (1968), Liza with a Z (1972) and Flatbush Avenue J (1976). He died on 2 March 2003 in Palm Springs, California, USA.- Director
- Writer
- Actor
Ansis Epners was born on 26 October 1937 in Riga, Latvia. He was a director and writer, known for Four Search for a Million (1979), My Cage (1993) and I Am Latvian (1990). He died on 2 March 2003 in Riga, Latvia.- Script and Continuity Department
- Additional Crew
- Writer
Luanna S. Poole was born on 6 April 1934. She was a writer, known for Rosemary's Baby (1968), The Odd Couple (1968) and The Monster of Piedras Blancas (1959). She died on 2 March 2003 in Los Angeles, California, USA.