Blog Archives

Baby, The Rain Must Fall: Remembering Glenn Yarbrough

Posted on September 19, 2016 by ronbase — 3 Comments

The singer Glenn Yarbrough died in August at the age of eighty-six after suffering from dementia for years. His voice and his songs were such a pivotal influence on my adolescence, I can’t imagine how I missed the news of…

Tagged with: Baby The Rain Must Fall, Everly Brothers, Glenn Yarbrough, Lee Remick, Ottawa Journal, Rod McKuen, Rose, Stanyan Street, Steve McQueen, The Limeliters, The Warm and Gentle Girls, Toronto Star
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Bumping Into O.J. Simpson

Posted on June 17, 2016 by ronbase — Leave a comment

Arriving on the San Francisco set of The Towering Inferno—the downtown Bank of America building was standing in for the film’s fiery skyscraper—there was no one around. In the Bank of America lobby I found extras dressed to look like…

Tagged with: Baffalo Bills, Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Ezra Edelman, Faye Dunaway, Jeffrey Toobin, Johnnie Cochran, Los Angeles, Nicole Simpson, North Palm Drive, O.J. Simpson, O.J.:Made In America, Paul Newman, Ron Goldman, San Franciso, Steve McQueen, Towering Inferno
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Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal: Falling in Love Letters

Posted on February 29, 2016 by ronbase — 1 Comment

Before the other night, the last time I saw Ryan O’Neal was on an elevator at Toronto’s Park Plaza Hotel. He was accompanied by his daughter, Tatum O’Neal, Helga Stephenson, at the time the Toronto film festival’s director of communications,…

Tagged with: A.R. Gurney, Ali MacGraw, Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall, Farrah Fawcett, Helga Stephenson, Lee Majors, Love Letters, Love Story, New Mexico, Robert Evans, Ryan O'Neal, Santa Fe, Steve McQueen, Tatum O'Neal, The Getaway
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Back To School–Without My Turtleneck

Posted on May 28, 2013 by ronbase — 1 Comment

I hated high school. All the more ironic, then, to find myself, nearly fifty years after I had successfully made my escape, back inside the Gulag of my youth. The Brockville Collegiate Institute (BCI, as we called it) celebrated its one hundred and twenty-fifth…

Tagged with: Brockville, Brockville Collegiate Institute, high school, Ogdensburg, President Kennedy, reunion, St. Lawrence River, Steve McQueen, The Great Escape
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Remembering Paul Newman

Posted on March 29, 2013 by ronbase — 5 Comments

Paul Newman was handing out popcorn late one cold night on the San Francisco set of The Towering Inferno. The disaster film–the world’s tallest skyscraper is on fire–that was to become 1974’s biggest hit was in its final production stages,…

Tagged with: Absence of Malice, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, California Street, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elizabeth Taylor, Faye Dunaway, Harper, Hombre, Hud, James Dean, Joanne Woodward, John Guillerman, Newman's Own, O.J. Simpson, Paul Newman, Sally Field, San Francisco, Sidney Lumet, Somebody Up There Likes Me, Steve McQueen, Sydney Pollack, The Bank of America building, The Cannes International Film Festival, The Glass Menagerie, The Hustler, The Long Hot Summer, The Sting, The Towering Inferno, The Verdict, William Holden
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Me and the Duke

Posted on November 15, 2011 by ronbase — 2 Comments

In 1975, I went down to Newport Beach, California to interview John Wayne at the rambling seaside bungalow where he had lived for ten years. Wayne promptly pumped me full of tequila, a drink I had never had before, and…

Tagged with: Brannigan, Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, Howard Hawks, John Ford, John Wayne, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Newport Beach, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, The Searchers, The Shootist, The Toronto Sun
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Norman

Posted on August 11, 2011 by ronbase — 4 Comments

My favorite Norman Jewison movie is Gaily, Gaily. I was only twenty and just starting out in the newspaper business when I saw it in 1969. I, of course, identified with the movie’s innocent reporter-protagonist, played by a very young…

Tagged with: Bell Lightbox, Doris Day, Hollywood, In The Heat of the Night, Moonstruck, Norman Jewison, Steve McQueen, The Cincinnati Kid, TIFF
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