Autumn release in America for ‘Dahmer’ movie

Jeffrey Dahmer

FilmRise will release “My Friend Dahmer,” based on former BJ artist John Backderf’s graphic novel about the gay serial killer, into North American theaters this autumn.

The movie created a stir at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.



John Backderf

Ross Lynch, a Disney Channel star, plays a high-school age Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer from Summit County who was Derf’s classmate. Anne Heche plays Joyce Dahmer, Jeffrey’s mentally unbalanced mother. Vincent Kartheiser (“Mad Men”) is a doctor that Dahmer becomes obsessed with. Alex Wolff (Nickelodeon’s “The Naked Brothers Band”) plays Backderf.

The film was shot in Dahmer’s boyhood home in Bath Township. The family from Doylestown to Bath Township in 1968. Dahmer was a 1978 graduate of Revere High School, which Backderf attended during Dahmer’s Revere years.

Dahmer murdered 17 men and boys in the Midwest, most of them in Wisconsin, between 1978 and 1991. A fellow prisoner killed Dahmer in 1994.

Olivia de Havilland, the Melanie Wilkes whose unselfishness contrasted to the petulant Scarlett’s behavior in the 1939 classic “Gone With the Wind,” is still alive at the age of 100.

She’s celebrating with dinner and drinks with “dear, dear” friends in Paris, where she’s lived for six decades after marrying a Frenchman.

Miss de Havilland was born in Japan to English parents, who reared her in Los Angeles where she became an American citizen. She was in films for eight decades, but “Gone With the Wind” brought her an Oscar and a permanent place in the memories of moviegoers.

Not even eight on-screen romances with swashbuckling Errol Flynn could top that.

She may have been sweet and loving in “Gone With the Wind” but she took on and beat Warner Brothers in a 1944 lawsuit that forced movie studios to limit their strangehold on actors to seven years, instead of ad infinitum.

Including inflation, 8 billion-dollar movies

Adjusted for inflation, there are eight movies that grossed at least $1 billion.

#1, no surprise, “Gone With the Wind,” the Clark Gable film from Margaret Mitchell’s classic about the end of southern aristocracy. $1.7 billion in today’s dollars; $198 million at the time.

#2 “Star Wars” $1.5 billion and climbing.

#3 “Sound of Music” $1.226 billion. #4 “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial” $1.221 billion. #5 “Titanic” $1.166 billion. #6 “The Ten Commandments” #$1.127 billion. #7 “Jaws” $1.102 billion.

And #8 “Doctor Zhivago” $1.068 billion.

My favorite movie of all time, “Casablanca,” with Humphrey Bogart at his finest and Claude Rains an excellent cast member, isn’t even on the list. I guess unselfish love and sacrifice and patriotism aren’t worth a hill of beans in this crazy world.

When Paula and I went to Paris for our 10^th anniversary, there were 29 Rick’s Place bars. We’ll always have Paris.

The rest of the story

Mark Price, in his article about Duke Ellington performing in Akron in 1945 with saxophonist Johnny Hodges, trumpeter Ray Nance, cornetist Rex Stewart, trombonist Lawrence Brown, trombonist Sam Nanton and drummer Sonny Greer, identified Beacon Journal theater writer Betty French as the mother of movie director Jim

Jim Jarmusch

Jarmusch.

That fired up my curiosity.

It turns out that Jarmusch grew up in Cuyahoga Falls with an Irish/German mother and a Czech/German Goodrich businessman.

Mama dropped Jarmusch off at the local movie house for a double feature while she ran errands. That did it.

His “Stranger in Paradise” is credited with kick-starting American independent films. Johny Depp, Robert Mitchum and Bill Murray were in Jarmusch movies.

Betty French was succeeded as BJ theater critic by Beatrice Margaret Offineer, whose byline was a more dazzling sounding "Peggy Starr." She died at the age of 34.

 To read about movie director Jim Jarmusch, click on

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Jarmusch

To read Mark Price’s article on Duke Ellington’s visit to Akron, click on

http://www.ohio.com/lifestyle/history/local-history-orchestra-leader-duke-ellington-took-a-train-to-akron-for-1945-concerts-1.602228