Happy Birthday, Robert Plant

Robert Anthony Plant was born on August 20, 1948. He is of course the lead singer and lyricist of Led Zeppelin, and quite simply, one of the great figures in the history of rock and roll. In his lyrics, one sees a wide range of influences from Norse and Welsh mythology to Tolkien to the blues. After the death of drummer John Bonham, Led Zeppelin broke up, and since then they’ve each found their own musical path, and Plant has constantly sought new influences and ideas. Raising Sand, the album he made with Allison Krauss and producer T-Bone Burnett shows that. He’s explored synth rock and roots music, Appalachian music and North Africans rhythms. He has nothing to prove but is constantly curiosity, always amazed by and interested in music. One has to remember the Kennedy Center Honors in 2012 where Led Zeppelin was honored and Plant had tears in his eyes at the performance of Stairway to Heaven, a song he’s heard probably more than anyone ever, and yet, it can bring him to tears. Plant is a musical genius, but more than that, a model for anyone, to never stop creating, never stop working, never stop finding wonder and ideas everywhere.

Happy Birthday, Gene Roddenberry

August 19, 1921 is the birth date of Eugene Wesley Roddenberry, the screenwriter and producer best known as the creator of Star Trek. Trained as a pilot during the Second World War, and after the war worked for Pan Am. In 1947, he was piloting a plane that crashed in the Syrian desert, and afterwards left flying to pursue his dream of being a writer. He moved to Los Angeles and got a job on the LAPD. He became a speechwriter for the Chief of Police, which led to him advising television productions, which led to him writing scripts for different shows. Roddenberry went onto create The Lieutenant, about Marines at Camp Pendleton, which lasted one season, running into problems because of a script involving racial prejudice. His next project was Star Trek, of which I was one of the millions of people obsessed by the show. Roddenberry tended to rewrite scripts, which led to problems with writers. Afterwards Roddenberry wrote a film for Roger Vadim (Pretty Maids All in a Row), wrote a number of pilots that didn’t go to series (Genesis II, Planet Earth, The Questor Tapes, Spectre) and worked on Star Trek: The Animated Series, attempted to revive Star Trek before launching the feature films and then The Next Generation. Admittedly Roddenberry managed to anger almost everyone working on TNG, and the show became significantly better once he stopped having much to do with the show. It’s hard to underestimate the influence of his optimistic humanist vision of the future and what was possible.

Happy Birthday, Joe Frank

August 19, 1938 was the birthday of the late writer and radio performer Joe Frank. Born Joseph Langermann in Strasbourg, France and grew up in New York City after his family emigrated. In the course of his career he published fiction and wrote plays, did voiceovers, but ultimately he remains best known for extensive work in radio. He began working in New York City where he hosted a show that was a mixture of monologues, sketches and live music. He worked at NPR’s All Things Considered for years and wrote for NPR Playhouse. In 1986 he moved to Los Angeles and began a weekly show for KCRW. To listen to his work is to discover a new form of radio. In his very best work he has this dry ironic sensibility, work that’s full of irony, and takes strange odd turns. From the episode where he kept promising a great story but he was going to a commercial break so he could drink his tea, and when he comes back…. Later in life he contributed work to KCRW"‘s Unfictional program, these beautifully shaped pieces like Dreamers, A Hollywood True Story, The Poor Are Always With Us, and Isolation. He had one of those voices, but more than that he had this mind that was able to craft so many incredible stories and find new ways to present them. A true visionary.

Happy Birthday, Steve Martin

August 14, 1945 is the birth date of Steve Martin. A writer, comedian, actor, musician, he’s one of those figures who is hard to pin down, and how a person defines him probably depends on how old they are, and what Martin was doing at the time. He began as a comedian and writer while in college, became a writer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, winning an Emmy Award at the age of 23. His comedy albums in the 1970s were massively successful, and Martin was a guest and host on Saturday Night Live many times, was a guest star on The Muppet Show, and in 1981, retired from comedy and began focusing on acting and writing. He has tended to move between comedy films like The Jerk, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, The Man with Two Brains, Three Amigos, with more serious work like Pennies From Heaven and The Spanish Prisoner.

Martin wrote a number of films that he also starred in including Roxanne, L.A. Story, Shopgirl, and the great comedy Bowfinger. Martin has written plays including Picasso at the Lapin Agile, books including The Pleasure of My Company, and a memoir, Born Standing Up, in addition to making multiple albums as a banjo player.

Strangely enough I think my introduction to Martin was The Muppet Movie where he plays an insolent waiter whose entire cameo is one great line after another. It’s very much a role that the wild and crazy Martin would have had in the 1970s when the film was made, and so very unlike the kinds of roles he’s known for today.

Happy Birthday, Wim Wenders

The filmmaker and photographer Wim Wenders was born August 14, 1945 in Dusseldorf, Germany. Part of the New German Cinema that arose in the 1970s, so much of his work is defined by road trips, journeys, about people transformed by travel. While he first achieved acclaim for his co-called “Road Movies trilogy” of films he made in Germany in the 1970s and An American Friend, his adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game, Wenders is that rare filmmaker who is perhaps as well known for his documentaries as for his fictional films. He went onto make movies like Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, which are quite simply, two of the greatest films ever made. Last year Criterion released the 287 minute cut of his 1991 film Until the End of the World, which deserves to be mentioned with his very best work. Among his many documentaries are Buena Vista Social Club, about Cuban musicians, Pina, about the choreographer Pina Bausch, The Salt of the Earth, about the photographer Sebastiao Salgado, and Pope Francis: A Man of His Word, which began when the Vatican wrote Wenders a letter asking if he would interested in making a film about the Pope.

Happy birthday, Gary Larson

August 14, 1950 is the birth date of Gary Larson, the cartoonist behind The Far Side. The single panel comic strip ran from 1979 to 1995 and at least among people my age, is considered done of the great comics of all time. Since retiring, Larson made a picture book for children, produced two animated specials, and recently began posting new comics on his website thefarside.com. His unique point of view and strange sense of humor has been influenced many people, led to more than one new species being named after him, and he coined the term “thagomizer” and for people who don’t know what that is, I encourage you to look it up because quite frankly the story behind it is so strange and funny that you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.

Happy Birthday, Bert Lahr

August 13, 1895 is the birth date of the acclaimed actor Bert Lahr. Born Irving Lahrheim in New York City, Lahr dropped out of school and went to work in vaudeville. Eventually Lahr found his way to Hollywood where he famously played the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. He had small roles in other film and TV productions, including The Night They Raided Minsky’s, a film about burlesque, a world he knew well, which Lahr was filming when he died. Lahr remained best known as a stage actor. He starred as Estragon in the first American production of Waiting for Godot. It was a failure, but Lahr went onto star in the Broadway production of the play, which was a success.

Shortly after his death, Lahr’s son John Lahr wrote the biography Notes on a Cowardly Lion, about his father, which was both a fascinating book for people interested in vaudeville and burlesque and theater life in the early 20th Century, but also traced how Lahr’s origins in comedy were not foreign to Beckett and that Lahr understood the play on multiple levels, even if he couldn’t talk about it the way that others could. It’s an unflinching look at how his father could be, his brilliance and his flaws, and displayed the kind of nuance and thoughtfulness that John Lahr has approached writing about the theater and about people his entire career. But he makes his father known to us. Those who only know him as the lion who says “Heavens to Murgatroyd!” but shows how much more there was to that performance and to that life. The highs and lows of it all, the struggle, and how those decades of struggle defined him. There’s a lot of stories of Hollywood and the theater which are fun and fascinating to read about it, but ultimately it is the story of a son trying to understand and appreciate his father.

Happy Birthday, Alfred Hitchcock

August 13, 1899 is the birthday of the late Alfred Hitchcock. In his lifetime, he was one of the most popular filmmakers in the world, and one of the most recognizable, but since his death in 1980, his stature has grown, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.

He was known as “the master of suspense” for the many thrillers he made, but like many writers who specialize in a genre, that meant that his technical skill as a director and storyteller often went unnoticed by many. One of those who didn’t was filmmaker Francois Truffaut who spent more than 50 hours interviewing Hitchcock, producing the great 1967 book Hitchock/Truffaut, which is considered an essential book for filmmakers, scholars and storytellers.

The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, Suspicion, Spellbound, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds and so many more aren’t simply thrillers, aren’t simply entertainment, they’re great films. Rear Window holds up as brilliant. Filmmakers have been trying to make something like To Catch a Thief ever since it came out because it’s light and entertaining and fun and suspenseful featuring beautiful actors in a beautiful setting - only to find that it’s much harder than it looks. Psycho and The Birds freak people out to this day.

And Vertigo is simply one of the greatest movies ever made. I saw it for the first time when it was rereleased and restored in the late 1990s and it was as strange and intense as I imagine it must have been to viewers in 1958. And remains strange and dazzling and unsettling and moving for all the same reasons today.

Happy Birthday, Edith Hamilton

August 12, 1867 is the birthday of Edith Hamilton. Today she is known and beloved for her books The Greek Way and Mythology. One of the great classicists of her generation for the generations who grew up after World War II, she spent much of her life as a teacher and headmistress at the Bryn Mawr School, an all girls prep school in Baltimore. She began writing after she retired, and her first book The Greek Way, was published when she was in her sixties. Mythiology was the book that kids my age who loved the myths were given after we graduated from the D’Aulaires beautiful illustrated texts. I liked Mythology well enough, but when I was a little older and read The Greek Way, it was one of the books that helped me to understand and appreciate Greek literature and culture. She never claimed to be a scholar, but for generations since, she has been one of the voices and minds who opened our eyes to the classics and the Mediterranean world.