The Screengrab

Just released in Britain and set to hit the U.S. early next year, Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood is a "humorous" memoir in which Tarzan's simian sidekick reflects back on his starlit career. Reviewing the book, Lynne Truss writes that, while funny, it also manages to use Cheeta's story to illuminate something real and even poignant about life in Hollywood. What did the monkey do out there? “What does any organism ever do except - survive?” writes Cheeta. “In this business, if your profile ever drops, you're dead." Cheeta, Truss points out, "views the great days of Hollywood in zoological terms...modesty does not prevent him from pointing out that, in his great middle-period work on the Tarzan pictures, he was a pioneer of “simian thespianism”. How much of his success in films was down to him being an animal? Cheeta will accept it's as much as 10%; the rest, however, was talent." And he is not without his opinions regarding his collegaues. “For three decades I think I ‘phoned it in' a bit. It happens to actors. Look at De Niro.”

Read More...

Few characters in motion picture history have been reimagined as many times as Tarzan. From the Johnny Weissmuller adventures of the 30s and 40s to the cheesecake of Bo Derek in Tarzan, The Ape Man to the literary pretentions of Greystoke to his most recent turn as a Disney cartoon, the lord of the apes has proved remarkably resilient. Now let’s see if he can survive the director of Van Helsing, GI Joe and two Mummy movies. Stephen Sommers will direct the latest version from Warner Bros., per The Hollywood Reporter. Sommers and screenwriter Stu Beattie “do not plan to work from the original 1914 Burroughs tome or any previous film. An entirely new approach is in the works, though more details beyond that are being kept under wraps tighter than Tarzan's loincloth.”

In a vaguely related development, Russian bodybuilder-turned-actor Alexander Nevsky will produce and star in Hercules: The Beginning.

Read More...

Ben Chapman has died, at the age of 79. The name probably means nothing to you, unless you were a member of his family or keep all your back issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland carefully sealed in protective Mylar bags. But for some of us, it's like hearing that the Blob died. Chapman played the title role in The Creature from the Black Lagoon back in 1954; more accurately, he played half the role, the half that took place above water. (The rest of the part was played, or rather swum, by Ricou Browning, who would later direct the underwater action sequences in the James Bond movie Thunderball and other aquatic potboilers.) The movie, which was directed by Jack Arnold (The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Mouse That Roared) and originally issued in 3-D, dealt with a team of scientists who are exploring what is supposed to be the Amazon and who encounter the titular creature, who mistakenly thinks that the heroine, played by Julia Adams, has been lured to his lagoon after seeing his picture at Match.com. It is sometimes called a classic, which is stretching things, but there's no question that a generation that was beginning to discover the classic Universal horror movie monsters on television and that was eager to have ghouls that it could call it own really took the frog-faced boy to their bosom. With his rubber-eggplant head and fixed expression, which gave it a passing resemblance to Lon Chaney, Sr.'s Phantom of the Opera, but with gills, he was an instant camp icon, one of the most endearingly pitiful monsters of his day.

Read More...