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Rose Gregorio, the Tony-nominated actress who played Nurse Carol Hathaway’s (Julianna Margulies) mom on NBC’s ER from 1996-99, has died. She was 97. The veteran star passed away of natural causes on August 17 in her Greenwich Village home, her nephew, Robert Grosbard, told The Hollywood Reporter. Born on October 17, 1925, in Chicago, Illinois, Gregorio began her career in theatre productions in Chicago and New York City during the 1950s and 1960s, becoming more active on television in the 1970s. Her first on-screen role came in the Armstrong Circle Theatre episode “The Fortune Tellers” in 1961, but after that, she moved to New York, where she would go on to have a successful career on Off-Broadway and Broadway, starring in the likes of William Snyder’s The Days and Nights of BeeBee Fenstermaker and Jack Gelber’s The Cuban Thing. ER/YouTube Throughout the 1970s, she appeared in many TV series, including The Doctors,...

The “found footage” technique has become one of the most popular styles in film, especially in the horror genre, and while The Blair Witch Project played a key role in popularizing it, the first found-footage movie came out almost four decades earlier. The popularity and success of the found-footage style in film mostly rely on how it's often marketed as telling a real-life story, which was the key to The Blair Witch Project’s viral success, and it gives writers and filmmakers a lot of creative freedom. Found footage has been used in a variety of genres, but it’s commonly used in the horror genre.

The world of horror is home to the most popular found-footage movies in film history, such as Paranormal Activity, Cloverfield, and Rec, with their success credited to The Blair Witch Project. While The Blair Witch Project is key in the history of found footage in film,...

In 1961, Shirley Clarke finished directing her first feature film and debuted The Connection at the Cannes Film Festival to much acclaim.

Previously, Clarke had begun her creative career as a dancer before moving on to direct many well-respected short experimental films, such as 1958’s Bridges-Go-Round. Clarke had always aimed her sights high with her career and, despite the improbability of a woman directing an independent feature film in the early 1960s, she accomplished just that.

The Connection was originally a play written by Jack Gelber and performed by New York City’s Living Theatre in 1959. The plot revolves around a group of junkies waiting around one afternoon for their drug dealer to arrive.

Clarke had seen and loved the play, but it was her brother-in-law — theater critic Kenneth Tynan — who convinced her to make a film of it. Money was raised through Lewis Allen, a theater investor who wanted to move into producing films.

(The purpose of Milestone Films’ ‘Project Shirley’ is to re-introduce the best available prints of Shirley Clarke’s work to audiences across the world. The Connection opens in NYC at the IFC Center on Friday, May 4, 2012. Visit the Milestone website to learn more.)

Usually when you watch a once-banned film decades after the fact, it leads to a deflated feeling that the film wasn’t ban-worthy at all, that it wasn’t ever close to being “dangerous.” But when one of those films is also widely deemed a classic by trusted sources? Well, that just about guarantees it’s going to land with a big, whopping letdown of a thud. So here comes a restoration of Shirley Clarke’s 1962 feature, The Connection, a film that 1) was banned upon its initial release, and 2) is considered to be a landmark achievement in American independent cinema. With a double-expectation like that, there’s no way it can deliver,...

Above: The second in New Yorker's "American Premieres" series: April 6-May 10, 1967.

In her author photo on the back jacket flap of her book, Toby Talbot is standing outside, leaning against some structure, a fence maybe. Her hand hangs at her side; she's wearing a sheer red scarf around her neck and tilting her head back, squinting a bit and smiling quite confidently at the camera. She looks very much like a woman who knows her own mind.

This impression is more than borne out by the writing inside her book, The New Yorker Theater And Other Secrets From A Life At The Movies. Talbot is the wife of and partner in all things with Dan Talbot; together they founded the legendary New Yorker Theater in the early '60s. More than a rep house, it was a defining feature of New York—and hence, international—film culture for over a decade.