Today, The Grandma is still relaxing at home. She has decided to watch some films, and she has chosen some masterpieces produced by ParamountPicturesCorporation, the American film and television production and distribution company that was founded on a day like today in 1912.
Paramount Pictures Corporation,commonlyknown as Paramount Pictures or simply Paramount, is an American film and television production anddistribution company and a subsidiary of 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 Big Five film studios still located in the city limits of Los Angeles.
In 1916, film producer Adolph Zukor put 22 actors and actresses under contract and honoured each with a star on the logo.
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 (MPA).
Paramount is the fifth oldest surviving film studio in the world after the French studios Gaumont Film Company (1895) and Pathé (1896), followed by the Nordisk Film company (1906), and Universal Studios (1912). It is the last major film studio still headquartered in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles.
Paramount Pictures dates its existence from the 1912 founding date of the Famous Players Film Company.
Hungarian-born founder Adolph Zukor, who had been an early investor in Nickelodeon, saw that movies appealed mainly to working-class immigrants. With partners Daniel Frohman and Charles Frohman he planned to offer feature-length films that would appeal to the middle class by featuring the leading theatrical players of the time, leading to the slogan Famous Players in Famous Plays.
By mid-1913, Famous Players had completed five films, and Zukor was on his way to success. Its first film was Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth, which starred Sarah Bernhardt.
That same year, another aspiring producer, Jesse L. Lasky, opened his Lasky Feature Play Company with money borrowed from his brother-in-law, Samuel Goldfish, later known as Samuel Goldwyn. The Lasky company hired as their first employee a stage director with virtually no film experience, Cecil B. DeMille, who would find a suitable site in Hollywood, near Los Angeles, for his first feature film, The Squaw Man.
Starting in 1914, both Lasky and Famous Players released their films through a start-up company, Paramount Pictures Corporation, organized early that year by a Utah theatre owner, W. W. Hodkinson, who had bought and merged several smaller firms. Hodkinson and actor, director, producer Hobart Bosworth had started production of a series of Jack London movies.
Paramount was the first successful nationwide distributor; until this time, films were sold on a statewide or regional basis which had proved costly to film producers. Also, Famous Players and Lasky were privately owned while Paramount was a corporation.
In February 1994, Viacom acquired 50.1% of Paramount Communications Inc. shares for $9.75 billion, following a five-month battle with QVC, and completed the merger in July.
At the time, Paramount's holdings included Paramount Pictures, Madison Square Garden, the New York Rangers, the New York Knicks, and the Simon & Schuster publishing house. The deal had been planned as early as 1989, when the company was still known as Gulf and Western.
Today, the weather continues cold and TheGrandma has decided to stay at home again. She is an old person and she must take care of her health. In the morning, a strong rain has surprised the city and its inhabitants and it has been a perfect moment for The Grandma to stay at her sofa and listen to classical music, one of her favourite hobbies.
The Grandma has chosen Yma Sumac, the Peruvian–American soprano, who was very popular some decades ago because she sang a range of over four and a half octaves, something really incredible. Sumac, whose name in Quechua, means How beautiful! is one of the most incredible an amazing voices of the last century.
After listening to Sumac, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Vocabulary 13).
Yma Sumac (September 10, 1923-November 1, 2008), was a Peruvian–American coloratura soprano. In the 1950s, she was one of the most famous exponents of exotica music.
Sumac became an international success based on her extreme vocal range. She had six-and-a-half octaves according to some reports, but other reports and recordings document four-and-a-half at the peak of her singing career. A typical trained singer has a range of about three octaves.
Yma Sumac
In one live recording of Chuncho, she sings a range of over four and a half octaves, fromB2 to G♯7.
She was able to sing notes in the low baritone register as well as
notes above the range of an ordinary soprano and notes in the whistle
register. Both low and high extremes can be heard in the song Chuncho, The Forest Creatures (1953). She was also apparently able to sing in a remarkable double voice.
In 1954, classical composer Virgil Thomson described Sumac's voice as very low and warm, very high and birdlike, noting that her range is very close to five octaves, but is in no way inhuman or outlandish in sound.
In 2012, audio recording restoration expert John H. Haley favorably compared Sumac's tone to opera singers Isabella Colbran, Maria Malibran, and Pauline Viardot. He described Sumac's voice as not having the bright penetrating peal of a true coloratura soprano, but having in its place an alluring sweet darkness, virtually unique in our time.
Sumac was born Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo on September 10, 1923, in Ichocán, a historically Indian village in Cajamarca, Peru. Her parents were Sixto Chávarri and Emilia del Castillo. Her father was born in Cajamarca and her mother was born in Pallasca. Stories published in the 1950s claimed that she was an Incan princess, directly descended from Atahualpa.
The government of Peru in 1946 formally supported her claim to be descended from Atahualpa, the last Incan emperor. She was the youngest of six children. Her mother was a schoolteacher and her father a civic leader.
Yma Sumac
Chávarri adopted the stage name of ImmaSumack, also spelled Ymma Sumack and Ima Sumack, before she left South America for the United States. The stage name was based on her mother's name, which was derived from ima shumaq, Quechua for how beautiful!, although in interviews she claimed it meant beautiful flower or beautiful girl.
Sumac first appeared on radio in 1942. She recorded at least 18 tracks of Peruvian folk songs
in Argentina in 1943. These early recordings for the Odeon label
featured composer Moisés Vivanco's troupe Compañía Peruana de Arte, of
16 Indian dancers, singers, and musicians.
She was signed by Capitol Records in 1950, at which time her stage name became Yma Sumac. Her first album, Voice of the Xtabay, launched a period of fame that included performances at the Hollywood Bowl and Carnegie Hall.
In 1950 she made her first tour to Europe and Africa, and debuted at the Royal Albert Hall in London and the Royal Festival Hall before the Queen. She presented more than 80 concerts in London and 16 concerts in Paris. A second tour took her to the Far East: Persia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Burma, Thailand, Sumatra, the Philippines, and Australia. Her fame in countries like Greece, Israel and Russia made her change her two-week stay to six months.
During the 1950s, she produced a series of lounge music recordings featuring Hollywood-style versions of Incan and South American folk songs, working with Les Baxter and Billy May. The combination of her extraordinary voice, exotic looks, and stage personality made her a hit with American audiences.
Yma Sumac
During the height of Sumac's popularity, she appeared in the films Secret of the Incas (1954) with Charlton Heston and Robert Young and Omar Khayyam (1957).
She became a U.S. citizen on July 22, 1955. In 1959, she performed Jorge Bravo de Rueda's classic song Vírgenes del Sol on her album Fuego del Ande.
In 1987, she recorded I Wonder from the Disney film Sleeping Beauty for Stay Awake and in 1989, she sang again at the Ballroom in New York and returned to Europe for the first time in 30 years to headline the BRT's Gala van de Gouden Bertjes New Year's Eve TV special in Brussels as well as the Etoile Palace program in Paris. She also gave several concerts in the summer of 1996 in San Francisco and Hollywood as well as two more in Montreal, Canada, in July 1997 as part of the Montreal International Jazz Festival.
On May 6, 2006, Sumac flew to Lima, where she was presented the Orden del Sol award by Peruvian President and the Jorge Basadre medal by the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.
Sumac died on November 1, 2008, aged 85, at an assisted living home in Los Angeles. She was interred at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in the Sanctuary of Memories section.
The Grandma and Claire Fontaine continue in Girona. They have visited the downtown and the most beautiful places of the city.
Every Sunday, there's a little market of antiquities and The Grandma has bought an interesting biography with questions and listenings about Marilyn Monroe who died on a day like today in 1962. Claire Fontaine and The Grandma want to remember this actress who has become an icon during more than forty years after her death.
Marilyn Monroe (June 1, 1926-August 5, 1962) was an American actress, model, and singer. She was born Norma Jeane Mortenson. Famous for playing comic blonde bombshell characters, she became one of the most popular sex symbols of the 1950s and was emblematic of the era's attitudes towards sexuality. Although she was a top-billed actress for only a decade, her films grossed $200 million by the time of her unexpected death in 1962. More than half a century later, she continues to be a major popular culture icon.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Monroe spent most of her childhood in foster homes and an orphanage and married at the age of sixteen. While working in a radioplane factory in 1944 as part of the war effort, she was introduced to a photographer from the First Motion Picture Unit and began a successful pin-up modeling career. The work led to short-lived film contracts with Twentieth Century-Fox (1946–1947) and Columbia Pictures (1948).
After a series of minor film roles, she signed a new contract with Fox in 1951. Over the next two years, she became a popular actress and had roles in several comedies, including As Young as You Feel and Monkey Business, and in the dramas Clash by Night and Don't Bother to Knock.
Norma Jeane Mortenson aka Marilyn Monroe
Monroe faced a scandal when it was revealed that she had posed for nude photos before she became a star, but the story did not tarnish her career and instead resulted in increased interest in her films.
By 1953, Monroe was one of the most marketable Hollywood stars; she had leading roles in the noir film Niagara, which focused on her sex appeal, and the comedies Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire, which established her star image as a dumb blonde.
Although she played a significant role in the creation and management of her public image throughout her career, she was disappointed when she was typecast and underpaid by the studio. She was briefly suspended in early 1954 for refusing a film project but returned to star in one of the biggest box office successes of her career, The Seven Year Itch (1955).
When the studio was still reluctant to change Monroe's contract, she founded a film production company in late 1954; she named it Marilyn Monroe Productions (MMP). She dedicated 1955 to building her company and began studying method acting at the Actors Studio.
In late 1955, Fox awarded her a new contract, which gave her more control and a larger salary. Her subsequent roles included a critically acclaimed performance in Bus Stop (1956) and the first independent production of MMP, The Prince and the Showgirl (1957).
Marilyn Monroe
Monroe won a Golden Globe for Best Actress for her work in Some Like It Hot (1959), a critical and commercial success. Her last completed film was the drama The Misfits (1961).
Monroe's troubled private life received much attention. She struggled with substance abuse, depression, and anxiety. Her second and third marriages, to retired baseball star Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller, respectively, were highly publicized and both ended in divorce.
During the final months of her life, Monroe lived at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. Her housekeeper Eunice Murray was staying overnight at the home on the evening of August 5, 1962.
Murray awoke at 3:00 a.m. on August 6 and sensed that something was wrong. Although she saw light from under Monroe's bedroom door, she was unable to get a response and found the door locked. Murray then called Monroe's psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who arrived at the house shortly after and broke into the bedroom through a window, finding Monroe dead in her bed. She was pronounced dead by her physician, Dr. Hyman Engelberg, who arrived at the house at around 3:50 a.m. At 4:25 a.m., they notified the Los Angeles Police Department.
Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe
Monroe had died between 8:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. on August 5, and the toxicology report revealed that the cause of death was acute barbiturate poisoning.
She had 8 milligrams per 100 milliliters of solution chloral hydrate and 4.5 mg% of pentobarbital, Nembutal, in her blood, and a further 13 mg% of pentobarbital in her liver. Empty medicine bottles were found next to her bed.
The possibility that Monroe had accidentally overdosed was ruled out because the dosages found in her body were several times over the lethal limit.
According to The Guide to United States Popular Culture, as an icon of American popular culture, Monroe's few rivals in popularity include Elvis Presley and Mickey Mouse... no other star has ever inspired such a wide range of emotions, from lust to pity, from envy to remorse.
Art historian Gail Levin stated that Monroe may have been the most photographed person of the 20th century, and The American Film Institute has named her the sixth greatest female screen legend in American film history.
Marilyn Monroe
The Smithsonian Institution has included her on their list of 100 Most Significant Americans of All Time, and both Variety and VH1 have placed her in the top ten in their rankings of the greatest popular culture icons of the twentieth century.
Hundreds of books have been written about Monroe. She has been the subject of films, plays, operas, and songs, and has influenced artists and entertainers such as Andy Warhol and Madonna.
She also remains a valuable brand: her image and name have been licensed for hundreds of products, and she has been featured in advertising for multinational corporations and brands such as Max Factor, Chanel, Mercedes-Benz, and Absolut Vodka.
Due to the contrast between her stardom and troubled private life, Monroe is closely linked to broader discussions about modern phenomena such as mass media, fame, and consumer culture.
Monroe was perceived as a specifically American star, a national institution as well known as hot dogs, apple pie, or baseball"according to Photoplay. She was considered a symbol of populuxe, a star whose joyful and glamorous public image helped the nation cope with its paranoia in the 1950s about the Cold War, the atom bomb, and the totalitarian communist Soviet Union.
Tina Picotes remembers her last visit to Los Angeles, California. She has great memories of her travel and wants to talk to us about the history of this amazing city which today is suffering one of the worst fires of its history.
Los Angeles, officially the City of Los Angeles and often known by its initials L.A., is the cultural, financial, and commercial center of Southern California. With a U.S. Census-estimated 2016 population of 3,976,322, it is the second most populous city in the United States, after New York City, and the most populous city in the state of California.
The Los Angeles coastal area was first settled by the Tongva, Gabrieleños, and Chumash Native American tribes thousands of years ago. A Gabrielino settlement in the area was called iyáangẚ meaning "poison oak place."
Map of Los Angeles City, 1894
Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, a Portuguese-born explorer, claimed the area of southern California for the Spanish Empire in 1542 while on an official military exploring expedition moving north along the Pacific coast from earlier colonizing bases of New Spain in Central and South America.
Gaspar de Portolà, the Catalan military who became the Governor of California, and Franciscan Majorcan missionary Joan Crespí, reached the present site of Los Angeles on August 2, 1769.
In 1771, Franciscan Majorcan friar Juníper Serra directed the building of the Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, the first mission in the area. On September 4, 1781, a group of forty-four settlers known as Los Pobladoresfounded the pueblo they called El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula; in English, The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of Porciúncula.
The Queen of the Angels is an honorific of the Virgin Mary; indeed, the present-day city still retains an active Roman Catholic Archdiocese, and as noted below, this archdiocese of Roman Catholicism remains the largest such archdiocese in the United States. Two-thirds of the settlers were mestizo or mulatto with a mixture of African, indigenous and European ancestry. The settlement remained a small ranch town for decades, but by 1820, the population had increased to about 650 residents.
Today, the pueblo is commemorated in the historic district of Los Angeles Pueblo Plaza and Olvera Street, the oldest part of Los Angeles.
Tina Picotes in Venice Beach, Los Angeles
New Spain achieved its independence from the Spanish Empire in 1821, and the pueblo continued as a part of Mexico. During Mexican rule, Governor Pío Pico made Los Angeles Alta California's regional capital.
Mexican rule ended during the Mexican–American War: Americans took control from the Californios after a series of battles, culminating with the signing of the Treaty of Cahuenga on January 13, 1847.
In 1910, Hollywood merged into Los Angeles, with 10 movie companies already operating in the city at the time. By 1921, more than 80 percent of the world's film industry was concentrated in L.A. The money generated by the industry kept the city insulated from much of the economic loss suffered by the rest of the country during the Great Depression. By 1930, the population surpassed one million.
The city is divided into over 80 districts and neighborhoods, many of which were incorporated places or communities that merged into the city. These neighborhoods were developed piecemeal, and are well-defined enough that the city has signage marking nearly all of them.
Tina Picotes in Los Angeles Dodgers Stadium
The city is divided into the following areas: Downtown Los Angeles, East Los Angeles and Northeast Los Angeles, South Los Angeles, the Harbor Area, Greater Hollywood, Wilshire, the Westside, and the San Fernando and Crescenta Valleys.
The city of Los Angeles and its metropolitan area are the home of ten top level professional sports teams. These teams include the Los Angeles Dodgers and Los Angeles Angels of Major League Baseball (MLB), the Los Angeles Rams and the Los Angeles Chargers of the National Football League (NFL), the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball Association (NBA), the Los Angeles Kings and Anaheim Ducks of the National Hockey League (NHL), the Los Angeles Galaxy of Major League Soccer (MLS), and the Los Angeles Sparks of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA).
I love Los Angeles, and I love Hollywood. They're beautiful.
Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.
The 1st Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), honored the best films of 1927 and 1928 and took place on May 16, 1929, at a private dinner held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles, California. AMPAS president Douglas Fairbanks hosted the show. Tickets cost $5, 270 people attended the event and the presentation ceremony lasted fifteen minutes. Awards were created by Louis B. Mayer, founder of Louis B. Mayer Pictures Corporation, at present merged into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It is the only Academy Awards ceremony not to be broadcast either on radio or television.
During the ceremony, the AMPAS presented Academy Awards, now commonly referred to as Oscars, in twelve categories. Winners were announced three months before the live event. Unlike later ceremonies, an actor or director could be awarded for multiple works within a calendar year. Emil Jannings, for example, was given the Best Actor award for his work in both The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command. Moreover, Charlie Chaplin and Warner Brothers each received an Honorary Award.
Major winners at the ceremony included 7th Heaven and Sunrise, which each received three awards, and Wings, receiving two awards. Among its honors, Sunrise won the award for Unique and Artistic Picture and Wings won the award for Outstanding Picture, now known as Best Picture. These two categories at the time were seen as equally the top award of the night intended to honor different and equally important aspects of superior film making. The next year, the Academy dropped the Unique and Artistic Picture award, and decided retroactively that the award won by Wings was the highest honor that could be awarded.
Fionnghuala Manon "Fionnula" Flanagan (1941) is an Irish actress and political activist. Flanagan was born and raised in Dublin, the daughter of Rosanna, née McGuirk, and Terence Niall Flanagan. Her father was an Irish Army officer and Communist who had fought in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War against Franco. Although her parents were not Irish speakers, they wanted Fionnula and her four siblings to learn the Irish language, thus she grew up speaking English and Irish fluently. She was educated in Switzerland and England. She trained extensively at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and travelled throughout Europe before settling in Los Angeles, California in early 1968.
Flanagan came to prominence in Ireland in 1965 as a result of her role as Máire in the Telefís Éireann production of the Irish language play An Triail, for which she received the Jacob's Award in Dublin for her outstanding performance. With her portrayal of Gerty McDowell in the 1967 film version of Ulysses, Flanagan established herself as one of the foremost interpreters of James Joyce. She made her Broadway debut in 1968 in Brian Friel's Lovers, then appeared in The Incomparable Max (1971) and such Joycean theatrical projects as Ulyssesin Nighttown, as Molly Bloom, and James Joyce's Women (1977). It was subsequently filmed in 1983, with Flanagan both producing and playing all six main female roles (Joyce's wife, Nora Barnacle, as well as fictional characters Molly Bloom and Gerty McDowell).
A familiar presence in American television, Flanagan has appeared in several made-for-TV movies and she made guest appearances in three of the Star Trek spin-offs.
She appeared in such films as The Others opposite Nicole Kidman and with Helen Mirren in Some Mother's Son, written and directed by Terry George, as the militantly supportive mother of a Provisional Irish Republican Army hunger striker in 1981. Subsequently, she spoke at a memorial hosted by Sinn Féin at the Citywest Building in Dublin for Irish republicans and their kin who were killed during the latest installment of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Flanagan and her husband, since 1972, Dr. Garrett O'Connor, an Irish nationalist from Dublin, are known to host parties at their Hollywood Hills home for people in the Irish community. In July 2009, she joined Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams for a series of lectures across the USA supporting Irish unity. In October 2011, she announced her support for Sinn Féin politician Martin McGuinness in his unsuccessful bid in Ireland's 2011 presidential election.
I'm Irish and always will be, but America has taught me so much.
Maybe it's here in the U.S. that we find a healing, for in the broader melting pot we get to look at some of these self-destructive attributes that we bring to bear upon our own quarrels and begin to solve them
Naiara was born in Alba
Iulia, one of the towns in Transylvania
(Romania) which still conserves its Latin etymology: Alba (alba-ae) means “light” and Iulia means “consecrated
to Jupiter” (Iovis).
Jupiter was considerate the main god in the Roman mythology.
The legend says that Jupiter liked creating handmade things and this is
something that connects this god with Naiara,
who is a carpenter, and adores working with wood and carve in it.
Romania is
the country home of some genius like Nadia
Comăneci, who won five medals in the Olympic Games and was the first
athlete who reached a 10 mark; Badea Cârţan,
a farmer who was an activist defending Transylvanian people rights against the Austro-Hungarian
Empire; Herta Müller, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature or Vlad Tepes (aka Dráculae).
Naiara
enjoys her work and during The Addams' trip to San Francisco, she decided to
visit another acclaimed city: Los Angeles. She wanted to meet Carpenters, her
favourite music group and spent some hours in Hollywood sharing time and
knowledge with the Twilight’s cast to remember her ancestors.
