Cinema Scholars

Early Years

James Harrison Coburn III was born on August 31, 1928, in the sparsely populated town of Laurel, Nebraska. When his father’s Ford dealership went out of business during the Great Depression, the Coburn family packed up and headed west, settling in the Los Angeles County city of Compton, California.

Coburn caught the acting bug early in life...

Early Years

Frances Lillian Mary Ridste was born in Fairchild. Wisconsin on New Year’s Day in 1919. Shortly after her birth, her father, a railroad mechanic, abandoned her family. Her mother, Clara, soon remarried, but by April 1921, this union ended as well.

In 1923, Clara packed up her five children and headed west, settling in San Bernardino, Califo...

Introduction

Michael Mann’s 1995 film Heat is still the benchmark for the crime genre and is also widely considered to be one of the more influential films in modern cinema. While it’s remembered for the first onscreen meeting between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, the film’s staying power comes from a tense, authentic atmosphere and ...

These are the stories of the men who had achieved fame in Hollywood and also served in the military during WWII.

Clark Gable

Eight months after the tragic death of his wife, Carole Lombard, in a plane crash, Clark Gable enlisted in the Army Air Corps on August 12, 1942. He enlisted as a private and was sent to the Officers’ Candidate School at Miami Be...

Introduction

Since its debut in 1954, the Godzilla franchise has scared and excited audiences for over seventy years. Ishiro Honda’s original Godzilla used the giant kaiju as a powerful symbol for nuclear destruction in postwar Japan. What followed was decades of entertainment. The colorful, monster-filled Showa era (1954–1975) featured Godzilla ba...