1976: The Start of Hollywood Blockbusters

I watched MORNING GLORY the other day. It stars Rachel McAdams as a young producer of a network morning news show who has to try and cage a iconic newsman, Harrison Ford, who thought he would be sailing through the rest of his contract.


The movie was okay for a weekend rental, but it was no DEVIL WEARS PRADA,

 a similar- assistant to a monster of a boss coming of age story starring Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway. There was not enough "at risk" , everyone kind of just did their "thing" and there was not enough build up of a crisis in my humble opinion, but that is not really what this post is about is how OLD, Harrison Ford looked, Mr. Ford if you are reading this I do apologies.

But this weekend, I was also enjoying reading about every page of Vanity Fair's Hollywood issue.

If you don't subscribe to it, I highly recomand getting it at the newstand. It has a great article on a ritzy trailer park in Malibu called Paradise Cove, an interesting article on Lauren Becall and a lot of pre Oscar coverage.

It also has a very interesting article on the making of ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN,

starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman- I really am getting to Harrison Ford, promise. I won't paraphrase the article in Vanity Fair-it is worth a read, but one interesting thing it pointed out was that era when ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, 1975-1977 also saw JAWS

considered to be the first blockbuster movie with a wide release followed by ALL THE PRESIDNET'S MEN, followed the next year by.. here is Harrison Ford, STAR WARS.

I was nine years old when riding on my bike to the Orchard Shopping center, I saw the title STAR WARS on the marquee and remember thinking to myself, "What does that mean, how do stars fight?"

The year before was the Bicentennial and Washington was just settling down from the scandal of Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein's book just out as was Redford and Hoffman's movie,

well being nine I didn't pay much attention to all that but was in Washington DC that summer for the July 4th festivities, because my father was doing his two year Forest Service stint in Washington.

We did the Smithsonian, many, many civil war battle fields, saw the Capitol and of course the fireworks were pretty amazing. I skipped around the nation's capitol with no concern or any memory of having the knowledge that a scandal just a little while before had rocked Washington to its core.

And because my dad lived back to back with a Secret Service agent, one night, riding in his Porsche, don't know if that is a favored car of the Secret Service, we got to go literally snoop around the White House. President Ford was out for the night at the theater I think, but we got to wander the halls, see the dishes in the china room, cant' remember which one, and even walk into the Oval Office and run around the circle rug, I think the tours at the time only got to look in the Oval Office. At the time, I thought the bathrooms were the coolest, with real towels instead of paper towels and the bathroom had two doors and I went out the wrong one and found myself in a long corridor with no one around, I wasn't brave enough to keep going and rushed back through to find everyone else.

Ohhh, what you don't worry about when you are nine. Nation's can fall and as long as there is things to entertain you, you are happy and oblivious and your heroes, like Han Solo don't grow old.......

 oh yeah they do!