Celebrate the 4th by watching television!
It’s another holiday, and that means more TV marathons and specials! Here’s a handy guide to the 4th (and the 5th and 6th).
July 4
- AMC has Planet of the Apes movies all morning, then the Jaws movies starting at 10:30am.
- At 6am, USA has a Walker, Texas Ranger marathon.
- TMC has episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (80s version) at 6, then Hitchcock movies all day.
- At 7, ESPN2 has coverage of Wimbledon Tennis.
- At 8, A&E has a marathon of Paranormal State.
- Biography has a City Confidential marathon starting at 8.
- There’s a Twilight Zone marathon starting at 8 on Sci-Fi.
- At 9, TruTV has a Beach Patrol marathon.
- FX has a King of the Hill marathon at 9.
- At noon, NBC has more Wimbledon.
- At 2pm, TV Land has an I Love Lucy marathon.
- At 3, HGTV has a Design Star marathon.
- At 8, PBS has A Capitol Fourth.
- At 9, NBC has the Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks Spectacular.
- At 10, CBS has the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular.
July 5
- At 8am, Bravo has a Top Chef marathon.
- At 9, NBC has the Wimbledon Ladies Final.
- At 11, Discovery has a Deadliest Catch marathon.
- At 1:30pm, ABC Family has the Harry Potter movies.
- At 2, A&E has a Criss Angel Mindfreak marathon.
- TV Land has a Hogan’s Heroes marathon starting at 2.
July 6
- At 9am, NBC has the Wimbledon Men’s Final.
- At 11, Food Network has a marathon of Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee episodes.
- At 3pm, CBS has the final round of the AT&T National Golf Tournament.
Michael Bay Boards Ouija Flick
Michael Bay sees dead people.
The Armageddon director is planning to summon up a feature film based on Hasbro’s supernatural Ouija board game.
Per the Hollywood Reporter, Bay and scribe David Berenbaum (Elf) have set up the movie at Universal as part of the studio’s whopping six-year megadeal with the toy giant.
No word yet on the Ouija, but we’re asking the spirits to make sure the flick won’t take its cues from Tawny Kitaen’s 1986 campy thriller Witchboard.
Hasbro conjured up its take on the legendary divination method in 1966 and has since sold millions of the board game.
Bay’s production company, Platinum Dunes, has become a big player in the horror genre, with recent remakes of The Amityville Horror, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hitcher. Bay’s redo of Friday the 13th is currently shooting for a 2009 release.
Additional projects in the pipeline include a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and an updated version of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Alfred Hitchcock on How the Introduction of Sound Hurt Cinema
I just discovered this quote from master filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, talking about how the introduction of sound and dialogue had in many ways hurt cinema:
“The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema; the only thing they lacked was the sound of people talking and the noises. But this slight imperfection did not warrant the major changs that sound brought in. In Many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema. They are mostly what I call ‘photographs of people talking.’ When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise. I always try first to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between… To me, one of the cardinal sins for a scriptwriter, when he runs into some difficulty, is to say ‘We can cover that by a line of dialogue.’ Dialogue should simply be a sound among sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.”
Two Star Trek veterans died this month
It’s not often that two people are so connected in these TV obituary roundup posts I do every week or so, but these two people are worth mentioning in the same post.
Alexander Courage, who composed the theme song for the original Star Trek series, died on May 15 at age 88. He also did music for episodes of many other series, including Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Waltons, Lost in Space, Land of the Giants, The Loner, Eight is Enough, Daniel Boone, Riverboat, and many others. He was also an orchestrator on several movies, including L.A. Confidential, The Haunting, The Mummy, First Knight, The Shadow, Rudy, Malice, Hook, Sleeping with the Enemy, The Poseidon Adventure, Hello Dolly, My Fair Lady, Guys and Dolls, and a ton of others.
But Courage wasn’t the only Star Trek figure to pass away that week…
Joseph Pevney directed several classic Trek episodes, including “City on the Edge of Forever,” “Amok Time,” “The Trouble with Tribbles,” and “The Immunity Syndrome.” Other shows that Pevney directed over the years include The Fugitive, The Munsters, The Rockford Files, The Incredible Hulk, Little House on the Prairie, Petrocelli, Fantasy Island, Emergency, Bonanza, Adam-12, Marcus Welby, M.D., Mission Impossible, Wagon Train, Twelve O’Clock High, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Bewitched, and too many others to mention. Pevney also directed many movies and was also a writer and actor. He died at age 96.