Avon Comedy Four
Smith and Dale were a famous American vaudeville comedy duo. They consisted of Joe Smith (born Joseph Sultzer on February 17, 1884February 22, 1981) and Charlie Dale (born Charles Marks on September 6, 1881November 16, 1971), who both grew up in the Jewish ghettos of New York City at the end of the 19th century. Beginning in their adolescence, their career spanned the majority of their lives, with the two performing together continuously for more than seventy years. The duo were one of several famous comic performers of vaudeville, radio and movies that collectively originated from the same place and era. Other entertainers included Gallagher and Shean, George Burns, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel and the Marx Brothers. Early life and work Sultzer and Marks met as teenagers in the fall of 1898, when they accidentally ran into each other while cycling. Joe was cycling north on Eldridge Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side, while Charlie was cycling east on Delancey. As they argued ov ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Smithdale
Smithdale may refer to: *Smithdale, Mississippi Smithdale is an unincorporated community located in Amite County, Mississippi, United States. Smithdale is approximately south-southwest of Auburn on Mississippi Highway 570 and a part of the McComb, Mississippi Micropolitan Statistical Area. ..., a community in Amite County * Smithdale, Pennsylvania, a community in Allegheny County {{Geodis ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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RKO Radio Pictures
RKO Radio Pictures Inc., commonly known as RKO Pictures or simply RKO, was an American film production and distribution company, one of the "Big Five" film studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. The business was formed after the Keith-Albee-Orpheum (KAO) theater chain and Joseph P. Kennedy's Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) studio were brought together under the control of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in October 1928. RCA chief David Sarnoff engineered the merger to create a market for the company's sound-on-film technology, RCA Photophone, and in early 1929 production began under the RKO name (an abbreviation of Radio-Keith-Orpheum). Two years later, another Kennedy holding, the Pathé studio, was folded into the operation. By the mid-1940s, RKO was controlled by investor Floyd Odlum. RKO has long been renowned for its cycle of musicals starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the mid-to-late 1930s. Actors Katharine Hepburn and, later, Robert Mitchum had their ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Jackie Gleason Show
''The Jackie Gleason Show'' is the name of a series of American network television shows that starred Jackie Gleason, which ran from 1952 to 1970, in various forms. ''Cavalcade of Stars'' Gleason's first variety series, which aired on the DuMont Television Network under the title ''Cavalcade of Stars'', first aired June 4, 1949. The show's first host was comedian Jack Carter, who was followed by Jerry Lester. Lester jumped to NBC in June 1950 to host the late-night show ''Broadway Open House'', and Gleason—who had made his mark filling in for William Bendix as the title character on the first television incarnation of ''The Life of Riley'' sitcom—stepped into ''Cavalcade'' on July 15, 1950 and became an immediate sensation. The show was broadcast live in front of a theater audience, and offered the same kind of vaudevillian entertainment common to early television revues. Gleason's guests included New York-based performers of stage and screen, including Bert Wheeler, Smith ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Technicolor
Technicolor is a series of Color motion picture film, color motion picture processes, the first version dating back to 1916, and followed by improved versions over several decades. Definitive Technicolor movies using three black and white films running through a special camera (3-strip Technicolor or Process 4) started in the early 1930s and continued through to the mid-1950s when the 3-strip camera was replaced by a standard camera loaded with single strip 'monopack' color negative film. Technicolor Laboratories were still able to produce Technicolor prints by creating three black and white matrices from the Eastmancolor negative (Process 5). Process 4 was the second major color process, after Britain's Kinemacolor (used between 1908 and 1914), and the most widely used color process in Cinema of the United States, Hollywood during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Technicolor's #Process 4: Development and introduction, three-color process became known and celebrated for its highly s ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Laurel And Hardy
Laurel and Hardy were a British-American Double act, comedy duo act during the early Classical Hollywood cinema, Classical Hollywood era of American cinema, consisting of Englishman Stan Laurel (1890–1965) and American Oliver Hardy (1892–1957). Starting their career as a duo in the silent film era, they later successfully transitioned to "sound film, talkies". From the late 1920s to the mid-1950s, they were internationally famous for their slapstick comedy, with Laurel playing the clumsy, childlike friend to Hardy's pompous bully. Their signature theme song, known as "The Cuckoo Song", "Ku-Ku", or "The Dance of the Cuckoos" (by Hollywood composer Marvin Hatley, T. Marvin Hatley) was heard over their films' opening credits, and became as emblematic of them as their bowler hats. Prior to emerging as a team, both had well-established film careers. Laurel had acted in over 50 films, and worked as a writer and director, while Hardy was in more than 250 productions. Both had appea ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Soundies
Soundies are three-minute American musical films, and each short displays a performance. The shorts were produced between 1940 and 1946 and have been referred to as "precursors to music videos" by UCLA. Soundies exhibited a variety of musical genres in an effort to draw a broad audience. The shorts were originally viewed in public places on "Panorams": coin-operated, 16mm rear projection machines. Panorams were typically located in businesses like nightclubs, bars, and restaurants. Due to World War II, Soundies also featured patriotic messages and advertisements for war bonds. More adult shorts, such as burlesque and stripteases, were produced to appeal to soldiers on leave. Technology Produced professionally on 35 mm black-and-white film, like theatrical motion pictures, they were printed on the more portable and economical 16 mm film. The Panoram "movie jukebox" was manufactured by the Mills Novelty Company of Chicago. Each Panoram housed a 16 mm RCA film projector, with ei ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Jules White
Jules White (born Julius Weiss; hu, Weisz Gyula; 17 September 190030 April 1985) was a Hungarian-American film director and producer best known for his short-subject comedies starring The Three Stooges Early years White began working in motion pictures in the 1910s, as a child actor, for Pathé Studios. He appears in a small role as a Confederate soldier in the landmark silent feature ''The Birth of a Nation'' (1915). By the 1920s his brother Jack White (film producer), Jack White had become a successful comedy producer at Educational Pictures, and Jules worked for him as a film editor. Jules became a film director, director in 1926, specializing in comedies such as The Battling Kangaroo (1926). In 1930 White and his boyhood friend Zion Myers moved to the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. They conceived and co-directed M-G-M's gimmicky Dogville Comedies, which featured trained dogs in satires of recent Hollywood films (like ''The Dogway Melody'' and ''So Quiet on the Canine Front ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Charley Chase
Charles Joseph Parrott (October 20, 1893 – June 20, 1940), known professionally as Charley Chase, was an American comedian, actor, screenwriter and film director. He worked for many pioneering comedy studios but is chiefly associated with producer Hal Roach. Chase was the elder brother of comedian/director James Parrott. Life and career Born Charles Joseph Parrott in Baltimore, Maryland, Charley Chase began performing in vaudeville as a teenager and started his career in films by working at the Christie Film Company in 1912. He then moved to Keystone Studios, where he began appearing in bit parts in the Mack Sennett films, including those of Charlie Chaplin. By 1915 he was playing juvenile leads in the Keystones, and directing some of the films as Charles Parrott. His Keystone credentials were good enough to get him steady work as a comedy director with other companies; he directed many of Chaplin imitator Billy West's comedies, which featured a young Oliver Hardy as villain ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production studio that is a member of the Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which is one of the Big Five studios and a subsidiary of the multinational conglomerate Sony. On June 19, 1918, brothers Jack and Harry Cohn and their business partner Joe Brandt founded Cohn-Brandt-Cohn (CBC) Film Sales Corporation, which would eventually become Columbia Pictures. It adopted the Columbia Pictures name on January 10, 1924 (operating as Columbia Pictures Corporation until December 23, 1968) went public two years later and eventually began to use the image of Columbia, the female personification of the United States, as its logo. In its early years, Columbia was a minor player in Hollywood, but began to grow in the late 1920s, spurred by a successful association with director Frank Capra. With Capra and others such as the most successful two reel comedy series The Three Stooges, Co ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Vitaphone
Vitaphone was a sound film system used for feature films and nearly 1,000 short subjects made by Warner Bros. and its sister studio First National from 1926 to 1931. Vitaphone was the last major analog sound-on-disc system and the only one that was widely used and commercially successful. The soundtrack was not printed on the film itself, but issued separately on phonograph records. The discs, recorded at rpm (a speed first used for this system) and typically in diameter, would be played on a turntable physically coupled to the projector motor while the film was being projected. It had a frequency response of 4300 Hz. Many early talkies, such as ''The Jazz Singer'' (1927), used the Vitaphone system. The name "Vitaphone" derived from the Latin and Greek words, respectively, for "living" and "sound". The "Vitaphone" trademark was later associated with cartoons and other short subjects that had optical soundtracks and did not use discs. Early history In the early 19 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American film and television production company, production and Distribution (marketing), distribution company and the main namesake division of Paramount Global (formerly ViacomCBS). It is the fifth-oldest film studio in the world, the second-oldest film studio in the United States (behind Universal Pictures), and the sole member of the Major film studio, "Big Five" film studios located within the city limits of Los Angeles. In 1916, film producer Adolph Zukor put 24 actors and actresses under contract and honored each with a star on the logo. In 1967, the number of stars was reduced to 22 and their hidden meaning was dropped. In 2014, Paramount Pictures became the first major Hollywood studio to distribute all of its films in digital form only. The company's headquarters and studios are located at 5555 Melrose Avenue, Hollywood, California. Paramount Pictures is a member of the Motion Picture Association of America, Motion Picture Associ ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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David Freedman
David Freedman (April 26, 1898 – December 8, 1936) (aged 38) was a Romanian-born American playwright and biographer who became known as the "King of the Gag-writers" in the early days of radio. Biography David Freedman was born in Botoşani, Romania, as the first child and only son of Sara and Israel Freedman. Israel, a political refugee, immigrated with his young family to the United States in 1900, where four years later, David's sister Sophie became the first Freedman born in the U.S. Freedman graduated from the City College of New York in 1918, the first in his family to complete a formal education beyond high school. In September 1918, he married Beatrice (née Rebecca Goodman), a fellow New Yorker, who was born in the city on September 27, 1899 (her parents had fled from Kishinev, Russian Empire). Within five years they had three sons, Benedict (1919–2012), Noel (1922–2008, later adopted name David Noel), and Toby (1924–2011). A decade later their only daugh ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |