Burt Lancaster

Question: Do you know the name of the first-ever made-for-TV movie?

Answer: Like all "first" questions, this one is thorny. Generally speaking, the first two made-for-TV movies are considered to have been The Killers and The Hanged Man, both of which date from 1964 and were made by MCA-Universal under the aegis of superagent-turned-media-mogul Lew Wasserman. Wasserman, who shepherded Universal into the world of television production and distribution, saw an opportunity to leverage one of the company's assets — a huge library of old movies — by remaking them for TV. The Killers was a remake of a 1946 film starring Burt Lancaster and based on Ernest Hemingway's short story read more

Question: My wife and I were having dinner recently at an Italian restaurant and the background music was Dean Martin singing songs from Guys and Dolls. We agreed that Martin would have been much better than Marlon Brando in the movie — was Martin too new on the Hollywood scene to be considered, or was the studio pushing  Brando?

Answer: Producer Sam Goldman wanted Gene Kelly to play Sky Masterson in the movie version of the Broadway hit Guys and Dolls (1955), but Kelly couldn't get released from his MGM contract. (Though MGM stands for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Sam Goldwyn was only part of the studio, which was formed by merging three existing companies, for a couple of years; in 1923, he formed his own Samuel Goldwyn Productions. MGM kept the read more