Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board

Just finished watching this. Although far from a masterpiece it’s 100 times better than Hollywood, probably one of the worst things I’ve ever seen

An inevitable conclusion, but at least she tried. To be so involved at 101 is remarkable.

Olivia's de Havilland's lawsuit has been tossed out:

http://variety.com/2018/biz/news/olivia ... 202736605/

Update on Olivia de Havilland's lawsuit against FX and Ryan Murphy Productions:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/m ... nd-sues-fx

Rumor has it that it is a preemptive strike against Murphy attempting a mini-series based on her well-known feud with her sister while she is still alive.

Good for her. And never underestimate her - after all, she's the person who legally brought down the Studio system (or at least contributed to its demise by winning her case against WB in the '40s).

She's blind, mostly deaf, over 100, and in Paris. How would she know?

Big Magilla wrote:Olivia de Havilland sues FX over her inaccurate, unauthorized portrayal in "Feud"

http://pagesix.com/2017/06/30/olivia-de ... 1473370799

Olivia de Havilland sues FX over her inaccurate, unauthorized portrayal in "Feud"

http://pagesix.com/2017/06/30/olivia-de ... 1473370799

Coincidentally or not, the official Oscars channel on YouTube, on its front page, shows the video of Crawford accepting the Best Actress Oscar for Anne Bancroft in 1963.

No detail, just a few snide remarks here and there.

Did Feud go into any detail about Crawford's stint at Pepsi?

Also, if I'm not mistaken, the "Joan Crawford is dead. Good." comment was an invention of female impersonator, Charles Pearce, not an actual quote from Davis herself. While I can picture her saying something like that to get laughs on a TV show years after Crawford's death, I can't believe she would say such a thing when called by an AP reporter immediately following Crawford's death. It would have created an immediate scandal.

Also gone in 1977:

The aforementioned Bing Crosby, Charlie Chaplin, Groucho Marx and of course, Elvis Presley, Ethel Waters, Howard Hawks, Maria Callas, Freddie Prinze, Jean Hagen and Charlotte Greenwood who convinced Crawford to become a Christian Scientist.

Two other glaring misrepresentations:

Christina Crawford wrote Mommie Dearest in retaliation for Crawford cutting her out of her will, not the other way around. No galley of the book existed for anyone to leak it to Crawford before her death.

B.D. Hyman's books about Davis were written after Davis suffered a series of strokes in 1983 and published in 1985 and 1987, so, yes, Davis knew about them and became very bitter over them, remaining so until her death in 1989, but that was long after the events chronicled in this dubious work.

I enjoyed this series well enough at the beginning, but thought it really lost its way near the conclusion, with last night's episode the worst of them all.

As I said last week, the creators just didn't do a great job exploring a deep enough thesis to fill out eight hours of content -- all the last episode seemed to amount to was "isn't it sad they weren't friends all along?" which is a thoroughly shallow conceit for a series. And certain things just didn't even make that much sense -- Bette hears the news of Crawford's passing and responds with her famous "Joan Crawford is dead. Good" line, but then she's at the Oscars acting like she's learned a lesson about not making catty comments about her rival, only there's no explanation for how that change came about.

I also thought the structuring device of the interviews came off even worse once it was revealed what it all was -- I mean, what WAS that? Was someone doing a documentary about the Bette-Joan relationship, and used backstage at the Oscars to film interviews with anyone who crossed paths with them? What a lazy screenwriting conceit. Similarly, it didn't make any sense that the characters in this series would have been so Crawford-focused during the In Memoriam (or whatever it was called then) -- they'd have all crossed paths with many of the other people who died that year, having them give a toast to Joan seems a totally myopic writing choice.

I think I liked the series best when it was at its nastiest -- it was then that it actually seemed to be getting at the most interesting things about the Davis-Crawford conflict, and what Hollywood was like for women of a certain age in that era -- but last night just dipped too much into what Margo Channing might have called "cheap sentiment," and I didn't find the emotion it was trying to peddle even remotely earned.

This was a truly horrid episode.

The 1977 Oscars, given in 1978, was the first time there was a montage of stars who had passed away during the Oscar year, notably Chaplin, Marx, Crawford and Crosby, but as Tee notes, it was as not yet referred to as an "in memoriam" segment and was not something anyone looked forward to as depicted in the episode. The genesis of it actually went back a year when Loretta Young wanted to do s segment on her friend Rosalind Russell who passed away in 1976. Friedkin refused , and added to his notoriety by further refusing to have Peter Finch's widow accept his award should be win. Friedkin's designate, Paddy Chayefsky defied him and brought Mrs. Finch up on stage to accept anyway.

In any event, the highlight of the 1977 Oscars was not Davis, not Crawford in memoriam, or any of the other legends involved in the show, it was Vanessa Redgrave's ranting about Zionist hoodlums and Chaefsky's later rebuke of her.

The whole thing, as was the series itself, was not so much "Bette and Joan" as it was "Joan with Bette in support". It wasn't balanced at all.

I don't know when the rift between Bette and her daughter was supposed to have occurred, but as late as 1981, the two must have been still talking. That's the year she made the TV movie, Family Reunion with her then 11 or 12-year-old grandson, Ashley.