“Melinda Dillon, Who Appeared in ‘A Christmas Story,‘ ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ Dies at 83”
She showed Paul Newman her terrific chest in Slap Shot










“Melinda Dillon, Who Appeared in ‘A Christmas Story,‘ ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ Dies at 83”
She showed Paul Newman her terrific chest in Slap Shot
Mr. Skin reported the following:
Here’s a nice recent interview.
Of the Laverne and Shirley principals, only Lenny (Michael McKean) survives. Both Laverne and Shirley have now passed on, as have Squiggy and The Big Ragu. They all died relatively young – aged 69 to 75. (McKean is 75 now.)
I suppose I haven’t thought about Cindy Williams in this millennium. If you had asked me yesterday to guess whether she was alive, my likelihood of a correct answer would have been the same as my chance of calling a coin flip correctly.
And yet her passing makes me sad. I reacted to her passing the same way I react when I hear of the loss of a high school classmate that I remember fondly, but have not thought about since graduation.
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She never did a nude scene. The closest she came, oddly enough, was when she mounted a comeback at age 50 in Meet Wally Sparks, the cast of which gave a fresh spark to the word “eclectic” (A few examples: Cindy, Rodney Dangerfield, Burt Reynolds, Gilbert Gottfried, Ron Jeremy, Jerry Springer, Sir Mix a Lot. Full list here.)
In the first episode of I Love Lucy, somebody said “Why don’t we have a cigarette?” The result looked like this:
They took the cigarettes out of a wooden box and never identified the brand, so the show wasn’t cashing in on a product placement. It was just a general pro-smoking message! Worse yet, Lucille Ball was obviously very pregnant (in real life) while she puffed away. She wore robes and aprons to hide it because her character was not pregnant, but it was painfully obvious whenever her contour could be seen. (Note how in the scene above she was in a very odd outfit for wandering around the apartment.)
Later in the episode, there was an obvious product placement. Fred and Ricky each drank a bottle of Ruppert beer on camera, and when they set the bottles down, the labels were conveniently turned toward the camera and in focus.
Although critics liked it, The Addams Family series was not particularly successful, having been abandoned by ABC after only two seasons. It nonetheless left a strong impression, far greater than expected for a black and white sitcom with anemic ratings (62nd in its second season). It is clearly remembered by all my boomer friends, and I can recall that it had cultural resonance at the time. It made the cover of TV Guide more than once, and there was a short period back in the day when my asshole high school buddies and I would always substitute “Why, thank you, Thing” for a simple “thanks.”
It endures in syndication, and has been lovingly rebooted again and again. As a commenter notes, both seasons are available on archive.org for those interested. Thank you to commenter (and of course, to Thing.)
After “The Addams Family” finished its two-season run, Loring joined Phyllis Diller’s sitcom “The Pruitts of Southampton.” The critics were somewhat less enthusiastic about that series. In 2002, TV Guide ranked The Pruitts of Southampton the 20th worst show of all time. (Full list.)
As an adult, Lisa did turn in one nude performance, in an obscure, low-budget 1989 horror film called Iced. She did a lot of tubbing, including a full (partially underwater) frontal:
Way back in 2007, Brainscan did a collage from this poor-quality VHS.
Those actually look like they would be damned sexy scenes if we had them in high definition.
Best picture nominees, with Metacritic score and Rotten Tomatoes score in parens:
(Asterisks indicate that the film also received a best director nomination)
All Quiet on the Western Front (76) (92%
Avatar: The Way of Water (67) (77%)
The Banshees of Inisherin * (87) (97%)
Elvis (64) (77%)
Everything Everywhere All at Once * (81) (95%)
The Fabelmans * (84) (92%)
Tár * (92) (90%)
Top Gun: Maverick (78)(96%)
Triangle of Sadness * (63) (72%)
Women Talking (78) (90%)
Other notes:
Hose job o’ the year: Charlotte Wells. Per Metacritic, the favorite of the critics in 2022 was Aftersun, which received only one nomination (Best Actor). Charlotte Wells, who wrote and directed, was not named in either category. Its Metacritic/RT score was (95) (96%), which was a stronger combination than any of the nominated films. It also had a higher IMDb rating than five of the Best Picture nominees. It is difficult to explain the nomination of Ruben Östlund over Charlotte Wells for best director and best original screenplay.
There is not much difference between the IMDb ratings of the ten Best Picture nominees.
Everything Everywhere All at Once was the runaway betting favorite before the noms were announced, and I suppose it still will be.
The bookies had She Said, Babylon and RRR in the top ten, in place of Women Talking, Elvis and All Quiet on the Western Front.
All Quiet is the longest of long shots, but is also nominated for Best Commie Film (or whatever they now call Best Foreign Film). Given the dual nominations, it is probably a good bet to win the international one.
If you look at the actual contribution of the directors to each of the movies listed above, it would not be unreasonable of you to argue that the wrong directors were nominated, with the exception that Everything Everywhere All at Once was certainly a deserving honoree. The nomination of Ruben Östlund really came out of left field.
Brendan Fraser completed his transition from leading man to successful character actor with a Best Actor nomination. (And he’s the betting favorite.)
Glass Onion was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. The Oscar people seem to have some arcane rules that shunt it into that category, but it is an original screenplay that simply happens to have a character that appeared in an earlier movie.
Rolling Stone did a truly thorough obituary, filled with anecdotes and videos.
I’m not sure of the cause of death, but I’m going to guess that she wasn’t killed trying to realize her dream of becoming an MMA champion. Kidding aside, she ran for office last year at an age when most people don’t think it’s worthwhile to start a long-playing record.
As usual, Variety did a good job on the obit.
David Letterman proposes to her:
As far as nudity goes – almost none. She was born too soon. The peak of her career was in Hollywood’s non-nude years (1935-62). She was already 40 in 1967, when nudity was becoming more commonplace in films.
She appeared in a see-thru in That Splendid November (1969)
And also appeared in the same outfit for a publicity still
Director Rene Clair did sneak in a very brief peek at the top half of Gina’s butt in Les Belles de Nuit (1952) .
(With the old fashioned-techniques on display, and a little bit of nudity, it’s hard to believe that’s a 1952 film. If I had just seen that frame without the context, I would have guessed no later than 1934, maybe even silent era.)
The same performer appears in The Wizard of Oz, The Bride Came C.O.D., Arsenic and Old Lace, You Can’t Take It With You and It’s a Wonderful Life.
And that Hollywood legend is …
Gary Sandy from WKRP sings at the 1982 Tony awards. Believe it or not, he was a Broadway star at the time. Unless you’re a huge trivia fan, you probably don’t know that he replaced Kevin Kline in The Pirates of Penzance.
You probably remember her as Stephanie, the spoiled rich girl who had to work as a maid at Bob Newhart’s inn in rural Vermont. The Newhart series made her face universally recognizable, and earned her seven consecutive Emmy nominations, granting her permanent respectability, but before that gig began she did a topless sex scene in a low-budget 1981 slasher film called Night Warning. (In home media releases it is called “Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker.”)
A Blu-Ray was issued some years ago:
To my knowledge, this was her only nudity in five decades of performing.
The diminutive actress is about 70 now, and has written an autobiographical account of her years in showbiz. Entitled Bad Auditions, her book was published in 2018. The AADA praised its honesty, calling it “an irreverent, light-hearted look into the real world of auditions – the good, the awkward, and the hilariously strange. In it, she regales readers with side-splitting stories of her own ‘bad’ auditions, in order to give fellow performers both insight and hopefully a sense they’re not alone.”
Even though she is still acting in TV and movies, you may not have thought of her in years. Here is what she looked like in a 2022 Christmas movie.
She leaves behind a solid legacy of nudity:
In Restraining Order (1999)
Film clip here
In various modeling assignments in the 1980s and 90s
Like all great award shows, it was held on a Tuesday night in a bowling alley.
“The Golden Globes were handed out Tuesday night, with The Fabelmans and The Banshees of Inisherin taking top honors on the film side and Abbott Elementary, House of the Dragon and The White Lotus among the big TV winners.”
Frankly, the Golden Globes show without Ricky Gervais is just a bunch of drunks kissing each other’s asses, but Jerrod Carmichael had a few good lines.
Here is his monologue, which is actually quite serious:
Click on the pic to get to a gallery:
Shellacked Stepdad points out:
Well, there’s another Baldwin, this time a skinny one with tits, she’s from the lesser known, or lesser successful Baldwin, who is actually pretty embarrassing on Twitter last I saw….BILLY BALDWIN….the star of what would be straight to DVD if DVDs were still a thing. He’s a real fucking loser of a Baldwin which is why I like him the best.
Anyway, he knocked up Chynna Phillips, daughter of the Mamas and the Papas main players. They have a 22-year-old daughter and she’s hot.
Scoop’s note:
Daniel Baldwin, who may be the least successful of the brothers, but is certainly the fattest, also has a couple of grown daughters. Alexandra is a model. Kahlea is a producer. Daniel’s family tree is complicated. He has five children by four different women, and they range in age from 13 to 38. You probably know that Alec has seven children with two women, and the kids range in age from 1 to 27.
Billy and Stephen are straight-laced compared to their brothers. Each has been married to only one woman, with three and two children, respectively. Stephen is a grandfather through Hailey’s sister Alaia.
Their older sister, Elizabeth, also has a large brood (a son and five daughters), and several grandchildren. The other Baldwin sister has two kids, so if I have the count right, the six sibs have produced 25 children. So each of them has 24 first cousins from just one side of the family. The oldest of those cousins was born in January of 1978, the youngest in February of 2021, more than 43 years later.
In an illustration of the thorough but incredibly useless info on the internet, Wikipedia has the entire family tree of the Baldwin sibs.
Taken from us so young. She suffered a tragic accident while playing a particularly tough game of rugby.
Seriously, she was really old, and I had no idea she was still alive. I think she was the last living woman to have dated any of the Founding Fathers.
Kidding aside, she had a most impressive career. In fact she had at least two impressive careers, having reached the top in legitimate broadcast journalism, then reaching the top again in that touchy-feely human interest chit-chat.
I (and pretty much everyone else) have been playing the game incorrectly all these years.
The rule we have been ignoring:
“Whenever a player lands on an unowned property he may buy that property from the Bank at its printed price. If he does not wish to buy the property it is sold at auction by the Banker to the highest bidder.”
Note that anyone may bid, including the player who declined to buy it at face value, and there is no minimum or maximum bid. Therefore, in any sensible game, a property should be sold every time somebody lands on it. If you don’t want it, I’ll be happy to start the bidding at a dollar, so either I or someone else must acquire it. That removes most of the luck from the game, since one’s fate is determined less by lucky dice rolls than by quickly accumulating the right properties at the right prices.
The movie may or may not be good, but the trailer is awesome!
“Glamorous poker star is slammed for distracting opponents with repeated X-rated wardrobe malfunctions that exposed her breast during a game – but all is NOT as it seems.”
(Prosthetic breasts.)