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Katharine Hepburn gives the greatest performance in the greatest movie ever made – at least that’s my huffy opinion and I’m allowed to mouth off like that as the founder, editor and president of this website. (I’m also the author of Variety’s books on the Movie Awards, Grammys and Emmys, by the way). But now that I brought up that point, it just reminded me of showbiz-themed trips TMC’s Robert Osborne used to do with other ole showbiz nuts. Did he organize them himself or just go along? I never asked him — I just loved to listen to his stories about them whenever I used to hang out with him socially in NYC. For several years he was an Oscar predictor here at Gold Derby, by the way. At one point, I forced Robert to push me around the Hollywood Museum for hours one day while I was stuck in a wheelchair after having had some ankle surgery. Oh, you can imagine all of the “Baby Jane” wisecracks that we two old queens couldn’t stop making all day. After Robert died, I bought at an estate sale the Peabody Award he won for his decades of brilliant Oscar coverage. (Paid $6,210.) Now I’m in the process of donating it and much of the rest of my own personal collection of historic showbiz awards to Jay Penske’s foundation. Jay and I are planning to figure out on how we’ll put the whole thing on public view, probably someplace at the office. That collection includes two of Hepburn’s official Oscar nominations (mounted): “Suddenly, Last Summer” and “The Rainmaker” plus two of her membership cards in the motion picture academy.
Sorry to digress. I guess my question to you all is how seriously would you take the idea of us Derbyites planning a vacation to Chinon castle together? We’d all have to pay for everything ourselves and we’d have to wait till this pandemic is over (probably spring, 2021), but this gives us an excuse to meet each other while doing something really cool. Here’s where we’d be going:
https://www.movie-locations.com/movies/l/Lion-In-Winter.php
I don’t even know how we’d plan one of these things. Just rent a giant bus or two? If we had enough people to participate, I could find someone at Penske Media to organize it for us.
By the way, another aside: for months since I discovered it on Spotify I have been listening over and over again to the film scores to “The Lion in Winter” and “Sophie’s Choice.” Can’t stop. (John Barry won an Oscar for the Lion score, by the way.) The one song I can’t shake is Eleanor’s arrival at Chinon Castle via barge – her bursting joy in the film’s first scene. It all comes to make much more sense later when she returns to the barge, still throwing Henry a kiss at the end as he (“lovingly,” is that the right word?) ships her back to jail. What a crazy, brilliant film it is!
Does anyone know much about James Goldman, other than he wrote the also-brilliant “They Might Be Giants”? Someone really needs to write a bio on him – I’d love to read it. In my mind, he’s the most brilliant of the Goldman brothers regardless of William’s huge fame (Oscars for “Butch Cassidy” and ” All the President’s Men.”) Oh, please don’t turn this forum thread into a debate on the Goldman brothers. James was Shakespeare compare to William’s average talent and that’s that. Let’s move on.
Shall we all go to Chinon?
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