Johnny Sheffield: ‘Boy’ in Tarzan movies of the 1940s
According to the Los Angeles Times obit, several hours earlier Sheffield had fallen off a ladder while pruning a palm tree. He was 79.
The son of British silent film actor Reginald Sheffield, Johnny Sheffield (born April 11, 1931, in Pasadena, northeast of downtown Los Angeles) got his film career started in Tarzan Finds a Son! (1939), in which Sheffield played a foundling – his parents (mom was future MGM leading lady Laraine Day) had died in a plane crash.
Adoptive parents Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) and Jane (Maureen O’Sullivan) frolicked with Boy in two more movies, Tarzan’s Secret Treasure (1941) and Tarzan in New York (1942). By then, MGM had downgraded the series to B status.
Sheffield couldn’t swim, but at least at first he had to pretend he did; Weissmuller knew of his shortcoming, but kept mum about it.
Weissmuller and Sheffield went on donning loincloths in five more movies. (Brenda Joyce replaced Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane.)
Following his last Tarzan movie, Tarzan and the Huntress (1947), Sheffield went over to the minor Monogram studios to play the lead in Bomba, the Jungle Boy (1949). Eleven cheaply made Bomba titles followed.
In the mid-1950s, Sheffield quit Hollywood and eventually got into real estate.
In later years, Sheffield remembered Weissmuller, who died in 1984, as always “kind and tender toward me.”
Bob Guccione: Penthouse publisher, Caligula producer
Penthouse founder Bob Guccione died at age 79 on Oct. 20 in Plano, Texas.
Best known for the explicit sexual content found in his magazine, a Playboy rival that began circulating in England in the mid-60s and in the United States near the end of the decade, Guccione (born in Brooklyn on Dec. 17, 1930) also produced the infamous Caligula (shot in 1976–1977, released in 1979).
Written by Gore Vidal and directed by Tinto Brass, Caligula starred Malcolm McDowell as the sociopathic Roman emperor, and featured Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud, Helen Mirren, and Paolo Bonacelli in supporting roles.
But what initially was to have been a prestigious production eventually became something else altogether.
Unhappy with Brass’ handling of the material, Guccione decided to spice things up with the addition of several sexually explicit scenes (shot by himself and Giancarlo Lui), including a wild orgy and a close-up shot of an ejaculating penis. Consequently, the 150-minute final product was banned in a number of countries.
Though hardly a great piece of filmmaking – Roger Ebert called it “sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash” – Caligula is definitely worth a look if only because of McDowell’s unhinged performance.
Joseph Stein: Fiddler on the Roof, Enter Laughing screenwriter
Screenwriter and playwright Joseph Stein, best known for his book for the Broadway musicals Fiddler on the Roof (1964) and Zorba (1968), died on Oct. 24. He was 98.
The Bronx-born Stein also wrote the screenplay for Norman Jewison’s Oscar-nominated 1971 film adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof and for the Carl Reiner-directed 1967 comedy Enter Laughing, based on Stein’s own play.
“There are no limitations to the subject for a musical,” Stein once said, “just as there are no limitations to the subject for a play or a novel. The only limitation that I can see is that it has to have an honesty about the relationship of people to each other.”
Joseph Stein quote: The Guardian.