The 1942 comedy The Major and the Minor is notable today as the Hollywood directing debut of Billy Wilder, who wrote the film with his longtime partner Charles Brackett. They would go on to make such classics as The Lost Weekend and Sunset Blvd., but in 1942 Wilder’s name wasn’t a selling point: it was all about Ginger and, to a lesser degree, leading man Ray Milland. In its first-run engagement at the two Paramount Theatres in L.A., the downtown branch added a second feature from B-movie specialists William Pine and William Thomas (known as the Two Dollar Bills), while both venues featured—and advertised—the latest of Paramount’s Superman cartoons, a testament to the appeal of...
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- 7/31/2014
- by Leonard Maltin
- Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy
Veteran film producer and friend to many of Hollywood's stars
The office walls of the film producer AC Lyles, who has died aged 95, were plastered with celebrity photographs. He seemed to know everybody in Hollywood, from presidents and governors to the great names of film, such as Elizabeth Taylor, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. James Cagney, William Holden and Ronald Reagan were close personal friends.
Lyles worked for the same company, Paramount, for most of his life, starting as a mailroom office boy in 1937, after the studio's head, Adolph Zukor, gave in to his weekly letters begging for a job.
Indeed, he maintained that he had decided on his ninth birthday that he was going to be a producer. At the age of 10, he had a cleaning job at the Paramount cinema in his home town of Jacksonville, Florida, and seeing the silent film Wings, starring Clara Bow, reinforced this aspiration.
The office walls of the film producer AC Lyles, who has died aged 95, were plastered with celebrity photographs. He seemed to know everybody in Hollywood, from presidents and governors to the great names of film, such as Elizabeth Taylor, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. James Cagney, William Holden and Ronald Reagan were close personal friends.
Lyles worked for the same company, Paramount, for most of his life, starting as a mailroom office boy in 1937, after the studio's head, Adolph Zukor, gave in to his weekly letters begging for a job.
Indeed, he maintained that he had decided on his ninth birthday that he was going to be a producer. At the age of 10, he had a cleaning job at the Paramount cinema in his home town of Jacksonville, Florida, and seeing the silent film Wings, starring Clara Bow, reinforced this aspiration.
- 10/6/2013
- by Michael Freedland
- The Guardian - Film News
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