News

Nicholas Pryor, the busy character actor who portrayed Tom Cruise’s father in Risky Business and Kathleen Robertson’s dad on Beverly Hills, 90210 during a career that spanned seven decades, has died. He was 89.

Pryor died Monday of cancer at his home in Wilmington, North Carolina, his wife, actress Christine Belford, told The Hollywood Reporter.

In a note to be delivered to THR after his death, he wrote: “Nicholas Pryor was enormously grateful to have been, for nearly 70 years, a working actor.”

From 1997-2002, Pryor played the former spy Victor Collins on the General Hospital spinoff Port Charles, culminating a long career in daytime soap operas that included stints on The Secret Storm, The Edge of Night, Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, All My Children and Another World.

Pryor recurred on Fox’s Beverly Hills, 90210 as A. Milton Arnold, the chancellor of California University and father of Robertson’s Claire Arnold,...

Gary Kent, the iconic B-movie stunt performer, actor and director who worked with Peter Bogdanovich, Richard Rush and Monte Hellman and served as an inspiration for Brad Pitt’s character in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, has died. He was 89.

Kent died Thursday evening at an assisted care facility in Austin, his son Chris Kent told The Hollywood Reporter.

Kent suffered two of his most painful injuries as a stunt performer in Rush films. He sliced up his arm on broken glass during a barfight fracas in Hells Angels on Wheels (1967) and was run over by an out-of-control motorcycle in The Savage Seven (1968), where he shared scenes with Penny Marshall.

His half-century stunt career came to an end on the set of Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) when he tumbled down a hill and damaged his leg, but he kept at it as a stunt coordinator, working as recently...

Chuck Bail, a stuntman turned director, goes with what he knows in this 1976 comedy about an illegal cross-country road race. Michael Sarrazin is a wealthy candy maker who instigates the party (code name “Gumball”) and his car-happy co-stars include Raul Julia and Gary Busey. Dominic Frontiere, composer for The Outer Limits, did the freewheeling score.

The post The Gumball Rally appeared first on Trailers From Hell.

Cars! Cars! Cars! What climate accord, when we’re celebrating the internal combustion engine! One of the best of the breezy ’70s action comedies, this cross-country road race picture gave us early looks at Gary Busey and Raul Julia in the midst of an always-amusing ensemble of car crazies, out to go from Manhattan to the Pacific in less than two days, at speeds up 175 mph! No 55 speed limit, no catalytic converters!

The Gumball Rally

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1976 / Color / 2:40 widescreen / 107 min. / Street Date June 13, 2017 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring: Michael Sarrazin, Raul Julia, Norman Burton, Gary Busey, John Durren, Susan Flannery, Harvey Jason, Steven Keats,

Tim McIntire, Joanne Nail, J. Pat O’Malley, Tricia O’Neil, Nicholas Pryor, Vaughn Taylor, Wally Taylor, Colleen Camp, Lazaro Perez, Med Flory, Lauren Simon, .

Cinematography: Richard C. Glouner

Film Editors: Stuart H. Pappé Gordon Scott, Maury Wintrobe

Original Music: Dominic Frontiere

Written by Chuck Bail,...

The Stunt Man, Richard Rush’s spectacular and highly entertaining 1980 film starring Peter O’Toole and Steve Railsback, will be screened on Wednesday, February 19, 2014 at the Landmark Theatre in Los Angeles. Director Richard Rush is scheduled to appear at the screening, and other cast members are due to be determined as the screening date approaches. From the press release:

Vietnam veteran Cameron (Steve Railsback) is on the run from the police when he stumbles onto the set of a war movie directed by megalomaniac Eli Cross (Peter O'Toole). But when the young fugitive is forced to replace a dead stunt man, he falls in love with the movie's leading lady (Barbara Hershey) while trying to avoid getting arrested or killed. Is Eli trying to capture Cameron's death on film? And what happens to a paranoid stunt man when illusion and reality change places? Completed in 1979 but unreleased until 1980, this innovative...

Start your engines up and beat the traffic in our Grease-lightning race through Hollywood's car chase hotspot

Anyone who's seen a Hollywood car chase over the last 30 years will recognise the 51-mile structure that runs from San Fernando Valley through to Long Beach. While most action films will set a high-speed pursuit in a congested city – swerving and screeching around rush-hour traffic – the La river is the go-to location for directors seeking a less metropolitan buzz. A one-on-one drag race perhaps? Or a battle between warring alien robots?

The river's dystopian expanse allows cinematographers to get creative and infuse the action with swooping aerial shots to accompany the spectacle of an automobile revving up its slanted walls. It's been featured in almost too many films, TV shows and music videos to count, but here are my favourite and most memorable La river races:

1) The river was renamed "Thunder Road" for Randal Kleiser's Grease,...

Netflix has revolutionized the home movie experience for fans of film with its instant streaming technology. Netflix Nuggets is my way of spreading the word about independent, classic and foreign films being made available by Netflix for instant streaming. Important Note: There may be some films that do not become available on the specified dates. This is merely a report of the most accurate release dates I can find, but is not directly confirmed by Netflix themselves.

American: The Bill Hicks Story (2010)

Streaming Available: 06/29/2011

Synopsis: Since his tragic death from cancer at age 32, comedian Bill Hicks’s legend and stature have only grown, and this unique documentary tells his story, blending live footage, interviews and animation to fill in the details of a life cut short. A comic’s comic and unflagging critic of hypocrisy and cultural emptiness, Hicks was one of a kind, a Lenny Bruce for the late 20th century,...

DVD Playhouse June 2011

By

Allen Gardner

Kiss Me Deadly (Criterion) Robert Aldrich’s 1955 reinvention of the film noir detective story is one of cinema’s great genre mash-ups: part hardboiled noir; part cold war paranoid thriller; and part science- fiction. Ralph Meeker plays Mickey Spillane’s fascist detective Mike Hammer as a narcissistic simian thug, a sadist who would rather smash a suspect’s fingers than make love to the bevvy of beautiful dames that cross his path. In fact, the only time you see a smile cross Meeker’s sneering mug is when he’s doling out pain, with a vengeance. When a terrified young woman (Cloris Leachman, film debut) literally crossed Hammer’s path one night, and later turns up dead, he vows to get to the bottom of her brutal demise. One of the most influential films ever made, and perhaps the most-cited film by the architects...

Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man comes to Blu-Ray. It’s glorious and stacked and one of the great movies about movies. You could win one courtesy our friends at Severin Films!

I got my hands and eyeballs on The Stunt Man Blu-Ray earlier this week and, I have to say, it’s really fantastic. Peter O’Toole is a total madman, Steve Railsback crushes every scene he’s in and Barbara Hershey’s just gorgeous. Richard Rush’s head-spinning, often hilarious, quite subversive littler thriller about stunts and moviemaking and love and death and all the other things that make life important is a classic. We’re really hoping to get Richard Rush to join us on the site and, hopefully, that will happen soon.

Until then, if you haven’t seen this or if you’re still stuck with the 2001 DVD release, you need this Blu-Ray. It’s positively stacked.

Severin Films has announced that 1980′s The Stunt Man will be coming to the HD format on June 7th, with a slew of wonderful and all-new extras.

Audio Commentary with writer/director Richard Rush and stars Peter O’Toole, Steve Railsback, Barbara Hershey, Alex Rocco, Sharon Farrell, & Chuck Bail

The Sinister Saga Of The Making Of The Stunt Man – Feature length documentary by Richard Rush

The Maverick Career Of Richard Rush – Exclusive new featurette

Peter O’Toole Recounts The Stunt Man – Exclusive new featurette

Devil’s Squadron – Exclusive new featurette with Steve Railsback and Alex Rocco

Barbara Hershey On Nina Franklin – Exclusive new featurette

The Stunt Man At The New Beverly – Blu-ray exclusive

Theatrical trailers

Deleted scenes

The extras that are in bold are all-new, while the others have been ported over from Anchor Bay’s long Oop disc. Richard Bush directed, as the film followed a fugitive who stumbles...