Quick Hits: June 29

***** CONTENT WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS REFERENCES TO DRUG USE, OVERDOSE, MURDER, AND A FATAL AUTO ACCIDENT *****

• The trailer for Ticket to Paradise dropped this morning. I am so here for this one.

• I’m also here for this charming-looking whodunit starring Saoirse Ronan and Sam Rockwell. I can’t get enough of period comedy-mystery flicks. See How They Run is slated for a September 30 release.

• Peacock’s The Resort, which premieres on July 28, stars the delightful William Jackson Harper and Cristin Milioti (and reunites Milioti with her Palm Springs exec producers).

• Jayne Mansfield died in a horrific car accident on this day in 1967. Mansfield was traveling from Biloxi to New Orleans for an appearance the next morning. Accompanying her were her partner Sam Brody and her three children with Mickey Hargitay (Miklós, Zoltán, and Mariska), along with their driver, Ronnie Harrison. At around 2:30 AM, their 1966 Buick Electra ran into the back of a tractor-trailer, which had slowed for an approaching vehicle with red flashing lights. The three adults in the front seat were killed instantly; the children, including three-year-old Mariska, all escaped with minor injuries. Despite the popular urban legend, Mansfield was not decapitated; her official cause of death was “crushed skull with avulsion of cranium and brain”.

• On this day in 1978, actor Bob Crane – best known as the titular character on Hogan’s Heroes – was found bludgeoned to death in the Scottsdale, Arizona apartment he rented while on tour with a dinner theater production of Beginner’s Luck. While the case remains officially unsolved, the killer was likely Crane’s friend – and partner in sexual escapades – John Henry Carpenter (Maricopa County never had enough evidence to convict Carpenter, who himself died in 1998). The fantastic movie Auto Focus – directed by Paul Schrader and based on a book by Zodiac author Robert Graysmith – is a dramatization of Crane’s life and death. Auto Focus, which you can stream on Tubi or rent on Amazon, stars Greg Kinnear as Crane and Willem Dafoe as Carpenter.

• Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller were married on this day in 1956, giving hope to nerds everywhere that they too might land the starlet of their dreams. The pair divorced in 1961.

• Singer-songwriter Tim Buckley died on this day in 1975 of a heroin and morphine overdose, 135 days after his twenty-eighth birthday (context: https://peanut-butter-and-julie.com/2021/04/05/the-27-club/).

• Film composer Bernard Herrmann was born on this day in 1911. Herrmann hit the jackpot with his first film, a little picture called Citizen Kane, for which he received his first Oscar nomination. That same year, he was also nominated for his second film, The Devil and Daniel Webster, which earned Herrmann his only Academy Award. In 1976, he repeated the one-two punch with posthumous nominations for Taxi Driver and Brian De Palma’s Obsession (Jerry Goldsmith took home the prize that year for The Omen). Herrmann is perhaps best known, though, for his work with Alfred Hitchcock; he composed the music for nine Hitchcock films, including Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds. Herrmann died in his sleep from an apparent heart attack in 1975, at the age of sixty-four.

• On this day in 2008, Leonard Cohen brought down the house at the Glastonbury Festival with a rendition of his iconic song “Hallelujah”.