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Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?

In October 1947, 10 Hollywood screenwriters, directors and producers refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (Huac), at the highly publicized, three-ring circus hearings in Washington, D.C. They wouldn’t acknowledge if they were Communists, nor would they name names of people whom they knew or thought were Commies citing their first amendment rights.

The group, who became known as the Hollywood Ten, were voted in contempt of Congress in November and sentenced to prison for six months to a year. They were blacklisted by the Hollywood studios. Some wrote under pseudonyms or used fronts (check out the 1976 film “The Front”) while others never worked again in Hollywood even after the blacklist ended in 1960.

On the 75th anniversary of those infamous Huac hearings, let’s take a look back at the Hollywood Ten and what...

This CinemaScope musical remake of 1939’s The Women is highly watchable, especially in this flawless digital remaster. The actresses that bare their claws, compete for husbands and just plain cat-fight are a choice batch, with favorites from the ’50s the ’40s the ’30s — plus a few wildflowers that bloomed cinematically for only a few years (Dolores Gray) and one that somehow managed immortality (Joan Collins). It’s highly watchable despite, or maybe because of, its criminally outdated recipe for marital bliss. Did women really go for this fantasy — did anybody ever really live like this?

The Opposite Sex

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1956 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 116 min. / Street Date October 27, 2020 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring: June Allyson, Joan Collins, Dolores Gray, Ann Sheridan, Ann Miller, Leslie Nielsen, Jeff Richards, Agnes Moorehead, Charlotte Greenwood, Joan Blondell, Sam Levene, Alice Pearce, Barbara Jo Allen, Sandy Descher, Carolyn Jones, Jerry Antes, Harry James, Art Mooney,...

This time on the podcast, David Blakeslee and Trevor Berrett discuss George Stevens’s Woman of the Year.

George Stevens’s Woman of the Year, conceived to build on the smashing comeback Katharine Hepburn had made in The Philadelphia Story, marked the beginning of the personal and professional union between Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, who would go on to make eight more films together. This tale of two newspaper reporters who wed and then discover that their careers aren’t so compatible forges a fresh and realistic vision of what marriage can be. The freewheeling but pinpoint-sharp screenplay by Ring Lardner Jr. and Michael Kanin won an Academy Award, and Hepburn received a nomination for her performance. Woman of the Year is a dazzling, funny, and rueful observation of what it takes for men and women to get along—both in the workplace and outside of it.

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Bogart and Bacall. Powell and Loy. Cinema history is chock full of iconic on-screen dynamic duos. However, few pairs have fostered more great films and a more historic legacy off screen than Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.

Two of classic Hollywood’s most legendary actors, the pair would share the screen for nine feature films that played part in a decades-spanning love affair as public as their films were instantly beloved. Working together for roughly 25 years, Tracy and Hepburn were the focus of beloved comedies like Adam’s Rib and ultimately the figureheads for a generation in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner. But where did it all begin?

That would be George Stevens’ seminal gender politics comedy Woman of the Year, which is now out in a delightfully rich Criterion Collection DVD and Blu-ray. With a screenplay from Ring Lardner Jr. and Michael Kanin (an Oscar winning one, at...

Four new movies are coming to the Criterion Collection this April: Juzo Itami’s “Tampopo,” Francis Ford Coppola’s “Rumble Fish,” Wim Wenders’ “Buena Vista Social Club” and George Stevens’ “Woman of the Year.” In addition, two musicals directed by Jacques Demy already in the Collection are receiving new standalone editions: “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “The Young Girls of Rochefort.” More information below.

Read More: The Criterion Collection’s 2017 Lineup: What Movies Are Being Added This Year?

“Tampopo”

“The tale of an eccentric band of culinary ronin who guide the widow of a noodle shop owner on her quest for the perfect recipe, this rapturous “ramen western” by Japanese director Juzo Itami is an entertaining, genre-bending adventure underpinned by a deft satire of the way social conventions distort the most natural of human urges, our appetites. Interspersing the efforts of Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto) and friends to make her café...

Lauren Bacall Dead: 89-year-old Oscar nominee who starred opposite Humphrey Bogart in ‘To Have and Have Not’ and ‘The Big Sleep’ Lauren Bacall has died following a massive stroke earlier today, August 12. Curiously, the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nominee for The Mirror Has Two Faces, and the star of film classics such as To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, and How to Marry a Millionaire, had been "killed" by an Internet hoax yesterday. Bacall would have turned 90 on September 16, 2014. According to Media Mass, the Lauren Bacall death rumors began on Monday, August 11, following the creation of a "R.I.P. Lauren Bacall" Facebook page that "attracted nearly one million of ‘likes.’" On the "R.I.P. Lauren Bacall" ‘About’ page, there was the following explanation: “At about 11 a.m. Et on Monday (August 11, 2014), our beloved actress Lauren Bacall passed away. Lauren Bacall was born on September 16, 1924 in New York.

Blacklisted screenwriter and president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

The screenwriter Fay Kanin, who has died aged 95, was the only female president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in its 86-year history (apart from Bette Davis, who resigned after two months in 1941). She served as president from 1979 to 1983, for the maximum of four consecutive one-year terms. Kanin, who committed herself to the preservation of early Hollywood movies, was first elected president by a board consisting of 34 men and one woman.

"I'm a big feminist," she declared at the time that her play Goodbye, My Fancy opened on Broadway in 1948. "I've put into my play my feeling that women should never back away from life." The serious comedy, with Madeleine Carroll as a powerful congresswoman revisiting her alma mater to receive an honorary degree, ran for more than a year and was made into a 1951 film starring Joan Crawford.

Los Angeles — Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Fay Kanin has died. She was 95.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences confirmed Kanin's death Wednesday. She served as president of the film academy from 1979 to 1983.

Kanin was nominated for an Academy Award for 1958's "Teacher's Pet" alongside her husband and writing partner, Michael Kanin. The film starred Clark Gable and Doris Day.

Fay Kanin was also recognized for her television contributions, winning two screenwriting Emmys in 1974 and another for producing the TV special "Friendly Fire" in 1979.

Details on Kanin's survivors and cause of death were not immediately available.

While two-time Oscar champ Bette Davis could lay claim to being the first female president of the motion picture academy, her tenure was short-lived, lasting just two months in 1941.  -Insertgroups:12- Fay Kanin, who died Thursday at age 95, was the second woman to head up the organization, serving with distinction from 1979 to 1983. She understood what it meant to contend for an Oscar, having been nominated alongside her husband Michael Kanin for their original script to the Doris Day-Clark Gable comedy "Teacher's Pet" in 1958; they lost to the "The Defiant Ones." Michael had won this award in 1942 for co-writing with Ring Lardner, Jr. "Woman of the Year," which was the first pairing of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.  Kanin, who had penned the play "Goodbye, My Fancy" which won Shirley Booth the first of her three Tonys in 1949, tried her hand at solo writing teleplays in the 1970s. After...

Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Fay Kanin has died. She was 95.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences confirmed Kanin’s death Wednesday. She served as president of the film academy from 1979 to 1983.

Kanin was nominated for an Academy Award for 1958′s Teacher’s Pet alongside her husband and writing partner, Michael Kanin. The film starred Clark Gable and Doris Day.

Fay Kanin was also recognized for her television contributions, winning two screenwriting Emmys in 1974 and another for producing the TV special Friendly Fire in 1979.

Details on Kanin’s survivors and cause of death were not immediately available.

Los Angeles, March 28: Fay Kanin, Hollywood screenwriter and former president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), has died at Beverly Hills, California. She was 95.

AMPAS confirmed the death of its first full-term female president Wednesday but failed to provide any details about her survivors and cause of death, reports Xinhua.

Born Fay Mitchell May 9, 1917 in New York city, Kanin attended University of Southern California and became a story editor at the Rko Pictures.

She met Michael Kanin, who later became her husband and writing partner, and the duo embarked on a long writing career.

The.

Fay Kanin, Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning screenwriter and former President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, died today at the age of 95. A New York native, Kanin began her showbiz career in the early 1940s. One of her earliest works was the MGM film Sunday Punch, about boxers living in a boarding house, which she co-wrote with her husband Michael Kanin. The duo went on to become one of the most successful husband and wife writing teams in Hollywood history. The couple also penned 1952′s My Pal Gus, 1954′s Rhapsody and 1956′s The Opposite Sex and they shared an Oscar nomination for the 1958 Clark Gable-starrer Teacher’s Pet. Fay Kanin also went to Broadway with Goodbye My Fancy (1949), about a female congressional representative renewing past loves, which her husband produced. When her husband’s interest in writing waned in the late 1960s, Fay Kanin went solo mainly writing TV movies,...

Fay Kanin, the Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning screenwriter who brought an energetic and assertive female voice to her work, then served four terms as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, has died. She was 95. Kanin, a New York State spelling bee champion at age 14 who with the late Michael Kanin made for one of the most popular husband-and-wife screenwriting teams in Hollywood history, died Wednesday of natural causes at her home in Santa Monica, her family said. The Kanins shared an Oscar nom for their spunky romantic comedy Teacher’s Pet (1958),

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Fans of classic movies know that "Woman of the Year" marks the beginning of the 25-year partnership, on- and off-screen, between one of film's most beloved and enduring couples: Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Released 70 years ago today (on January 19, 1942), "Woman of the Year" came to define combustible romantic chemistry, thanks to the two fiery, evenly-matched leads. It launched a partnership that lasted until Tracy's death in 1967, a quarter-century union that resulted in nine films and an extramarital affair that was Hollywood's worst kept secret. What fans may not know is how the partnership came to be, who the real-life inspirations were for Hepburn's high-minded columnist and Tracy's earthy sportswriter, or the forgotten screen pairing of the two stars that came four years earlier. Read on for the untold story of "Woman of the Year" and its long afterlife in the realms of Broadway, TV, and magazines. 1. "Woman of the Year...