by PETER BESAS
It’s Oscar time once again, the third round on the Simesite. So all you film buffs, gamblers, hotshots, filmic psychologists, put on your thinking caps and send us your picks for what you think will be the winners of the Academy Awards for 2005.
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by RON HOLLOWAY
Nearly everyone in my crowd flashed the same puzzled look as we left the press screening at the Palais on the Croisette during the 1971 Cannes film festival.
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Veteran Variety, film scribe and copy editor George Gilbert, 92, passed away in a hospital near his home in Crystal River, Florida, on the evening of February 12. His daughter, Corinne Pinkos, was with him at the end and says his illness was sudden. He was suffering from a bad cold that he just couldn’t seem to kick.
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By MORT BRYER
It was late on a raw, chilly, damp November day in 1978 that I was sitting next to Roger Watkins in the back seat of one of those wonderful London cabs, creeping up a narrow street somewhere in the bowels of London, already late for appointments with a several clients, including one at the Beeb. The cab inched along in the usual heavy traffic in central London. A 90 year old, with a walker and a bad case of bunions, could have made better time.
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By Morton Bryer (special envoyé from Norwalk)
St. Paddie’s Day in old Madrid! I couldn’t resist the idea of taking a trip to swinging Madrid in late February to soak up some Spanish culture, to gas, gossip and hit some pubs and grubberies with Senor Besas, but more importantly to check out the modus operandi of the editorial office of Simesite. There had been rumors about some irregularities, of how the editor didn’t get to work till 10 or 11 a.m., or how he was wont to stray from the path of total commitment and instead take long walks in the park and sip wine in cafes, or spend hours on the Internet exchanging gossip and questionable political opinions with some of his cronies.
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