By trade, I’m a full-time film historian/critic who has authored/co-authored four movie history books. I say this because at one point in the new play Taming the Lion Joan Crawford (as depicted by Marie Broderick) tells William Haines (Landon Beatty) he’s the top box office movie star on Earth. Yet until I was invited to cover Taming the Lion this reviewer had never even heard of Haines, who also is not listed in David Thomson’s The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. The world premiere of playwright Jack Rushen’s two-act dramatization of real-life Hollywood history and personalities explains why.

Throughout the 1920s and until the mid-1930s Haines was a leading man in Tinseltown, appearing in about 50 flicks. In 1929 he starred in the ironically entitled A Man’s Man, which Greta Garbo and John Gilbert are also in, and played the title character in 1931’s Just a Gigolo. A number of Haines’ pictures were military-themed, such as 1926’s Tell It to the Marines, 1929’s Navy Blues, 1934’s The Marines are Coming.

Another football ‘controversy’ has started when football players participating in the ongoing ‘UEFA Euro 2020’, kneeled down during national anthems to protest racism, a serious problem that has plagued football stadiums for many years. 

From Simply Living

Here’s what happened at the July Free Press Second Saturday Cyber-Salon on July 10.

Watch the recording here.

Cyber salon host and Free Press Board member Mark Stansbery introduced speaker Dr. Fadhel Kaboub, who spoke about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Fadhel is an Associate Professor of economics at Denison and President of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity.

Sunday, June 6; Sunday, June 20; and Sunday, July 11; 8-10pm, this event will be occurring via Zoom

Join the Revolutionary Socialist Network to discuss Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, which systematically tackles a number of important aspects of the Palestinian struggle for liberation, contextualizing it in an increasingly polarized world and offering a socialist perspective on how full liberation can be won.

Through an internationalist, anti-imperialist lens, this book explores the links between the struggle for freedom in the United States and that struggle in Palestine and beyond. It examines both the historical and contemporary trajectory of the Palestine solidarity movement in order to glean lessons for today’s organizers, and compellingly lays out the argument that, in order to achieve justice in Palestine, the movement has to take up the question of socialism, regionally and internationally.

Contributors include: Jehad Abusalim, Shireen Akram-Boshar, Omar Barghouti, Nada Elia, Toufic Haddad, Remi Kanazi, Annie Levin, Mostafa Omar, Khury Petersen-Smith, and Daphna Thier.

June 6: Chapters 1-3