Climax! (TV Series)
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Climax! (TV Series)
''Climax!'' (later known as ''Climax Mystery Theater'') is an American television anthology series that aired on CBS from 1954 to 1958. The series was hosted by William Lundigan and later co-hosted by Mary Costa. It was one of the few CBS programs of that era to be broadcast in color, using the massive TK-40A color cameras pioneered and manufactured by RCA, and used primarily by CBS' arch-rival network, NBC (the broadcasting division of RCA). Many of the episodes were performed and broadcast live, but, although the series was transmitted in color, only black-and-white Kinescope#Eastman Television Recording Camera, ''kinescope'' copies of some episodes survive to the present day. The series finished at #22 in the Nielsen ratings for the 1955-1956 season and #26 for 1956-1957. Notable episodes In 1954, the Climax! episode Casino Royale (Climax!), "Casino Royale" featured secret agent James Bond in a television adaptation of Ian Fleming's novel ''Casino Royale (novel), Casino Royale' ...
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Dennis O'Keefe
Dennis O'Keefe (born Edward Vanes Flanagan, Jr., March 29, 1908 – August 31, 1968) was an American actor and writer. Early years Born in Fort Madison, Iowa, O'Keefe was the son of Edward Flanagan and Charlotte Flanagan, Irish vaudevillians working in the United States. As a small child, he joined his parents' act and later wrote skits for the stage. He attended the University of Southern California but left midway through his sophomore year after his father died. Career O'Keefe continued his father's vaudeville act for several years after the father's death. He started in films as an extra in 1931 and appeared in numerous films under the name Bud Flanagan. After a small but impressive role in '' Saratoga'' (1937), Clark Gable recommended O'Keefe to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which signed him to a contract in 1937 and renamed him Dennis O'Keefe. His film roles were bigger after that, starting with ''The Bad Man of Brimstone'' (1938) opposite Wallace Beery, and the lead role ...
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Alex North
Alex North (born Isadore Soifer, December 4, 1910 – September 8, 1991) was an American composer best known for his many film scores, including ''A Streetcar Named Desire'' (one of the first jazz-based film scores), ''Viva Zapata!'', ''Spartacus'', ''Cleopatra'', and ''Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'' He was the first composer to receive an Honorary Academy Award, but never won a competitive Oscar despite fifteen nominations. He wrote the music for Unchained Melody as the theme for the prison film '' Unchained'' (1955), It has become a standard and one of the most recorded songs of the 20th century, with over 1,500 recordings made by more than 670 artists, in multiple languages. Early life North was born Isadore Soifer in Chester, Pennsylvania, to Jewish parents Jesse and Baila (Bessie) who had left the Russian Empire for the US around 1906. Jesse was from Bila Tserkva and Besie originated from Odessa (both cities are now in Ukraine). In the US, Jesse was a blacksmith, an ...
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Peter Lorre
Peter Lorre (; born László Löwenstein, ; June 26, 1904 – March 23, 1964) was a Hungarian and American actor, first in Europe and later in the United States. He began his stage career in Vienna, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, before moving to Germany where he worked first on the stage, then in film in Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Lorre caused an international sensation in the Weimar Republic-era film '' M'' (1931), directed by Fritz Lang, in which he portrayed a serial killer who preys on little girls. Of Jewish descent, Lorre left Germany after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power. His second English-language film, following the multiple-language version of ''M'' (1931), was Alfred Hitchcock's '' The Man Who Knew Too Much'' (1934), made in the United Kingdom. Eventually settling in Hollywood, he later became a featured player in many Hollywood crime and mystery films. In his initial American films, '' Mad Love'' and ''Crime and Punishment'' (both 193 ...
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Barry Nelson (actor)
Barry Nelson (born Robert Haakon Nielsen; April 16, 1917 – April 7, 2007) was an American actor, noted as the first actor to portray Ian Fleming's secret agent James Bond. Early life Nelson was born in San Francisco, the son of Norwegian immigrants, Betsy (née Christophersen) and Trygve Nielsen His year of birth has been subject to some debate, but is listed as 1917 on both his 1943 Army enlistment record and his 1993 voter registration records. Career With MGM, Nelson made his screen debut in the role as Paul Clark in ''Shadow of the Thin Man'' (1941) starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, with Donna Reed. He followed that with his role as Lew Rankin in the film noir ''Johnny Eager'' (1942) starring Robert Taylor and Lana Turner. During his service in the United States Army Air Forces in World War II, Nelson debuted on the Broadway stage in Moss Hart's play ''Winged Victory'' (1943) in the role of Bobby Grills. His next Broadway appearance was as Peter Sloan, playwright, i ...
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Casino Royale (novel)
''Casino Royale'' is the first novel by the British author Ian Fleming. Published in 1953, it is the first List of James Bond novels and short stories, ''James Bond'' book, and it paved the way for a further eleven novels and two short story anthology, collections by Fleming, followed by numerous continuation Bond novels by other authors. The story concerns the British secret agent James Bond (literary character), James Bond, gambling at the casino in Royale-les-Eaux to bankrupt Le Chiffre, the treasurer of a French union and a member of the Russian secret service. Bond is supported in his endeavours by Vesper Lynd, a member of his own service, as well as Felix Leiter of the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA and List of James Bond allies#René Mathis, René Mathis of the French Deuxième Bureau. Fleming used his wartime experiences as a member of the Naval Intelligence Division (United Kingdom), Naval Intelligence Division, and the people he met during his work, to provide plot ...
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Ian Fleming
Ian Lancaster Fleming (28 May 1908 – 12 August 1964) was a British writer who is best known for his postwar ''James Bond'' series of spy novels. Fleming came from a wealthy family connected to the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co., and his father was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Henley from 1910 until his death on the Western Front in 1917. Educated at Eton, Sandhurst, and, briefly, the universities of Munich and Geneva, Fleming moved through several jobs before he started writing. While working for Britain's Naval Intelligence Division during the Second World War, Fleming was involved in planning Operation Goldeneye and in the planning and oversight of two intelligence units, 30 Assault Unit and T-Force. He drew from his wartime service and his career as a journalist for much of the background, detail, and depth of his James Bond novels. Fleming wrote his first Bond novel, '' Casino Royale'', in 1952. It was a success, with three print runs being commissio ...
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James Bond
The ''James Bond'' series focuses on a fictional British Secret Service agent created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short-story collections. Since Fleming's death in 1964, eight other authors have written authorised Bond novels or novelisations: Kingsley Amis, Christopher Wood, John Gardner, Raymond Benson, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver, William Boyd, and Anthony Horowitz. The latest novel is ''With a Mind to Kill'' by Anthony Horowitz, published in May 2022. Additionally Charlie Higson wrote a series on a young James Bond, and Kate Westbrook wrote three novels based on the diaries of a recurring series character, Moneypenny. The character—also known by the code number 007 (pronounced "double-oh-seven")—has also been adapted for television, radio, comic strip, video games and film. The films are one of the longest continually running film series and have grossed over US$7.04 billion in total at the box office ...
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Casino Royale (Climax!)
"Casino Royale" is a live 1954 television adaptation of the 1953 novel of the same name by Ian Fleming. An episode of the American dramatic anthology series ''Climax!'', the show was the first screen adaptation of a James Bond novel, and stars Barry Nelson, Peter Lorre, and Linda Christian. Though this marks the first onscreen appearance of the secret agent, Nelson's Bond is played as an American spy working for the "Combined Intelligence Agency". Most of the largely forgotten show was uncovered by film historian Jim Schoenberger in 1981, with the ending (including credits) found later. Both copies are black and white kinescopes, but the original live broadcast was in colour. The rights to the program were acquired by MGM at the same time as the rights for the 1967 film version, clearing the legal pathway and enabling it to make the 2006 film of the same name. Plot "Combined Intelligence" agent James Bond comes under fire from an assassin. He dodges the bullets and enters Casi ...
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Nielsen Ratings
Nielsen Media Research (NMR) is an American firm that measures media audiences, including television, radio, theatre, films (via the AMC Theatres MAP program), and newspapers. Headquartered in New York City, it is best known for the Nielsen ratings, an audience measurement system of television viewership that for years has been the deciding factor in canceling or renewing television shows by television networks. As of May 2012, it is part of Nielsen Holdings. NMR began as a division of ACNielsen, a 1923-founded marketing research firm. In 1996, NMR was split off into an independent company, and in 1999, was purchased by the Dutch conglomerate VNU. In 2001, VNU also purchased ACNielsen, thereby bringing both companies under the same corporate umbrella. NMR is also a sister company to Nielsen//NetRatings, which measures Internet and digital media audiences. VNU was reorganized and renamed the Nielsen Company in 2007. History The Nielsen TV Ratings have been produced in the U ...
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Kinescope
Kinescope , shortened to kine , also known as telerecording in Britain, is a recording of a television program on motion picture film, directly through a lens focused on the screen of a video monitor. The process was pioneered during the 1940s for the preservation, re-broadcasting and sale of television programmes before the introduction of quadruplex videotape, which from 1956 eventually superseded the use of kinescopes for all of these purposes. Kinescopes were the only practical way to preserve live television broadcasts prior to videotape. Typically, the term Kinescope can refer to the process itself, the equipment used for the procedure (a movie camera mounted in front of a video monitor, and synchronized to the monitor's scanning rate), or a film made using the process. The term originally referred to the cathode ray tube used in television receivers, as named by inventor Vladimir K. Zworykin in 1929. Hence, the recordings were known in full as kinescope films or kines ...
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Anthology Series
An anthology series is a radio, television, video game or film series that spans different genres and presents a different story and a different set of characters in each different episode, season, segment, or short. These usually have a different cast in each episode, but several series in the past, such as ''Four Star Playhouse'', employed a permanent troupe of character actors who would appear in a different drama each week. Some anthology series, such as '' Studio One'', began on radio and then expanded to television. Etymology The word comes from Ancient Greek ἀνθολογία (''anthología'', “flower-gathering”), from ἀνθολογέω (''anthologéō'', "I gather flowers"), from ἄνθος (''ánthos'', "flower") + λέγω (''légō'', "I gather, pick up, collect"), coined by Meleager of Gadara circa 60 BCE, originally as Στέφανος (στέφανος (''stéphanos'', "garland")) to describe a collection of poetry, later retitled anthology – see Gr ...
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Monaural
Monaural or monophonic sound reproduction (often shortened to mono) is sound intended to be heard as if it were emanating from one position. This contrasts with stereophonic sound or ''stereo'', which uses two separate audio channels to reproduce sound from two microphones on the right and left side, which is reproduced with two separate loudspeakers to give a sense of the direction of sound sources. In mono, only one loudspeaker is necessary, but, when played through multiple loudspeakers or headphones, identical signals are fed to each speaker, resulting in the perception of one-channel sound "imaging" in one sonic space between the speakers (provided that the speakers are set up in a proper symmetrical critical-listening placement). Monaural recordings, like stereo ones, typically use multiple microphones fed into multiple channels on a recording console, but each channel is " panned" to the center. In the final stage, the various center-panned signal paths are usually mixed d ...
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