DVD Tuesday Ace in the Hole lays into the public appetite for sensation and the tabloid media machine that feeds it 55 years later nothing has changedSend your movie questions to FlickChickSee Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this weeks new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcastHear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide TalkAs soon as I got my first VCR I began waiting for Billy Wilders lacerating Ace in the Hole 1951 to come out on video Never happened And why its taken so long to come to DVD when you can choose from multiple editions of all manner of junk is one of lifes little mysteries But its finally here courtesy of the Criterion Collection so goodbye combing listings for the rare TV showing or ponying up for someone elses made-from-TV bootleg The anti-hero of Ace in the Hole which was also released as The Big Carnival and tanked under both titles is Charles Tatum Kirk Douglas a bastard of a disgraced big-city newspaperman looking for a way bac
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Question: When did directors start getting credits like “Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho," where their names are given as "owners" of their films?
Answer: That’s called a possessory credit, and popular belief is that it’s a product of the '50s, when directors began thinking of themselves as solo auteurs rather than parts of a collaborative team. This struck many other behind-the-scenes personnel, especially screenwriters, as a world-class case of too-big-for-their-britches syndrome. Otto Preminger lobbied hard for and got the especially lofty “A film by Otto Preminger” credit, which prompted a legendary exchange between director Billy Wilder and screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond. “That’s Otto Preminger’s house,” Wilder is supposed to have observed as they were driving, to which Diamond replied, “No, that’s ‘A House by Ot
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