August 12-14

This week's milestones:

August 12, 1881: Movie director Cecil B. DeMille was born.

"It is my indignant opinion that 90 percent of the moving pictures exhibited in America are so vulgar, witless and dull that it preposterous to write about them in any publication not intended to be read while chewing gum." -- Woolcott Gibbs (1902-1958).



August 13, 1899: Movie director Alfred Hitchcock was born.

"Conversation is the enemy of good wine and food," Hitchcock said.



August 14, 1867: Birthdate of English author John Galsworthy, who wrote:

"Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem."

And tomorrow is another day in cynicism

Margaret Mitchell's novel, Gone With the Wind, was published on this day in 1936. It became a movie in 1939.

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." -- Rhett Butler.

Never gone with the wind

The great movie critic Pauline Kael was born on this day in 1919. She died in 2001.

"There are so many things that we, have lived through them, or passed over them, never want to think about again," Kael wrote. "But in movies nothing is cleaned away, sorted out, purposely discarded. There's a kind of hopelessness about it: what does not deserve to last lasts, and so it all begins to seem one big pile of junk."

That, and cell phones in theaters

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was established on this day in 1927.

"Movies are one of the bad habits that have corrupted our century." -- Ben Hecht.

The stuff that dreams are made of

Today is the birthday of actor Sydney Greenstreet. He played Kasper Gutman (the Fat Man) in The Maltese Falcon.

When Sam Spade, played by Humphrey Bogart, suggests to Gutman that he sacrifice his underling, the "gunsel" Wilmer, to the police, Gutman thinks a minute, then tells Wilmer:

"I couldn't be fonder of you if you were my own son. But, well, if you lose a son, it's possible to get another. There's only one Maltese Falcon."