vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Promo photo of Dennis Hopper, actor in Rebel without a Cause, Cool Hand Luke, and Apocalypse Now, also co-writer, co-star and director of the eternal Easy Rider, seen here circa 1955. Easy Rider‘s official tagline was: A man went looking for America—and couldn’t find it anywhere. It was meant to describe Peter Fonda’s character Captain America, but it is real-life maverick Hopper for whom the line always seemed more apt
Above: assorted album sleeves from Argentine soundtrack maestro Lalo Schifrin, circa 1970s. Schifrin’s name may not be universally known, but he provided the mood music for scores of movies and television shows, from Mission: Impossible to Cool Hand Luke. Over the course of his career, which is ongoing, he’s won five Grammy Awards, and has been nominated for for six Academy Awards and four Emmy Awards. If you’ve watched vintage crime or thriller films or television shows, you’ve probably heard him, but he’s especially beloved by record mavens for one major reason—his music tends to stand solidly on its own, without visual accompaniment.
The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.
In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the painting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.
BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.
Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.
Actress Joanne Woodward receives the first star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Los Angeles sidewalk at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street that serves as an outdoor entertainment museum. Woodward was one of 1,558 honorees chosen by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce in 1958, when the proposal to build the sidewalk was approved. Today the sidewalk contains more than 2,800 stars.
Satchel Paige becomes the first player from America’s Negro Baseball League to be voted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Paige, who was a pitcher, played for numerous Negro League teams, had brief stints in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Major Leagues, before finally retiring in his mid-fifties.
