The Real Story: James Brown and “Ski Party”

Posted on July 31, 2014 at 8:00 am

One of the highlights of this week’s “Get on Up” is a scene where James Brown and his group appear in a teen movie set in a ski chalet. The fun of the scene is seeing the R&B performers so far from their usual milieu, wearing ski sweaters and performing for a bland group of white kids perkily clapping along. It’s not far from the real story. Here’s the clip from “Ski Party,” released in 1965 and starring Frankie Avalon, Dwayne Hickman, and Deborah Walley.

Here’s the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZo954DwLhA

The film also re-creates this performance from the T.A.M.I. Show, fire fighter and all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_jqhXNF98A

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Jersey Boys: The Real Story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons

Posted on June 18, 2014 at 3:59 pm

This week, Clint Eastwood’s film of the wildly successful, Tony Award-winning musical “Jersey Boys” opens in theaters. It is based on the real-life story of one of the most successful pop groups of the 1960’s, The Four Seasons, who produced a string of Top 40 hits like “Sherry,” “Walk Like a Man,” “Rag Doll,” “Let’s Hang On,” and “Working My Way Back to You.” But the show is more than the usual jukebox musical. Actors playing the members of the group, Bob Gaudio, Frankie Valli, Nick Massi, and Tommy DeVito, each give their versions of the group’s scrappy origins, their run-ins with the mob, and their conflicts with each other, with their record label, and with their families.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMgPVKEKrSg

The actor Joe Pesci was a friend of the group. He is portrayed in the film by actor Joseph Russo. Here is the real Pesci with three of the group’s original members, from the Tony Awards broadcast. You can also see Tony Award-winner John Lloyd Young, who appears in the film as well.

As with any story of events involving several people, it reflects the varying memories and perspectives of the participants. Some of the facts and chronologies have been changed. The movie shows the group being arrested in Ohio, but this article has the real story. The movie shows two of the members leaving at the same time, but in reality, Nick Massi stayed for five more years after Tommy DeVito left.

There’s even a teacher’s guide to Jersey Boys to explore the themes of biography and culture and even the economics of the vig! And take a look at Parade Magazine’s story about Frankie Valli’s return to his roots with the cast of the film.

If you want to see the real Frankie Valli, be sure to watch Rob Reiner’s new film, where he appears briefly as a nightclub owner.

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Fault in Our Stars: The Real Story

Posted on June 4, 2014 at 3:59 pm

The film of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, 72 weeks on the best-seller list, comes to theaters this week, starring Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort as teenagers with cancer who manage to find love and meaning in a world of pain and loss. Green based the characters on teenagers with cancer he met working as a student chaplain.

Hazel Grace, played by Woodley, was inspired in part by Esther Grace Earl, who died at age 16 in 2010. Her journal and letters are collected in This Star Won’t Go Out: The Life and Words of Esther Grace Earl. Green wrote an introduction to the book, and Fault in Our Stars is dedicated to her. All proceeds from the book go to helping young people with cancer.

Her parents spoke about her in an interview with WBUR.

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The Real Story: Million Dollar Arm

Posted on April 29, 2014 at 8:00 am

It sounds like a movie. No, it sounds like a fairy tale, but it really happened. A sports agent named J.B. Bernstein found two cricket-playing Indian athletes named Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel by staging a reality television show and brought them to the US to play baseball. More than 30,000 men tried out on the show, which was Bernstein’s idea as a way to find a source for possible overlooked players with potential — and for possible new fans for baseball from the world’s second most populous country.

Even though they had never played baseball before, Bernstein found USC trainer Tom House (played by Bill Paxton in the film) to taught them to pitch so well that eight months after arriving in the US they were professional baseball players for the Pittsburgh Pirates. It was inevitable it would become not just a movie but a Disney movie, along the lines of “The Rookie” and “Miracle.”

The upcoming film starring “Mad Men’s” Jon Hamm as Bernstein and Suraj Sharma and Madhur Mittal as Singh and Patel has over the closing credits some photos and video clips of the real players. Here’s a news story about their journey.

Singh finished 2012 with the Class A West Virginia Power of the South Atlantic League, and Patel was released in 2010. He is back in India and still involved in athletics. They met with the filmmakers and the actors who played them on screen and had a chance to relive some of the incredible events by watching the filming.

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Heaven is for Real: The Real Story

Posted on April 15, 2014 at 3:59 pm

“Heaven is for Real” opens tomorrow, with Greg Kinnear as Todd Burpo, a Nebraska pastor whose four-year-old son says that he visited heaven during surgery for a ruptured appendix. It is based on a best-selling book Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back, by Burpo and Lynn Vincent (co-author of Sarah Palin’s book, Going Rogue). Burpo says that his son, Colton

talked about looking down to see the doctor operating and his dad praying in the waiting room. The family didn’t know what to believe but soon the evidence was clear.

In heaven, Colton met his miscarried sister whom no one ever had told him about and his great-grandfather who died 30 years before Colton was born. He shared impossible-to-know details about each. Colton went on to describe the horse that only Jesus could ride, about how “reaaally big” God and his chair are, and how the Holy Spirit “shoots down power” from heaven to help us.

The movie follows the essential elements of the book pretty closely. The Burpos dismiss Colton’s description of heaven at first. But when he describes where they were during the operation, identifies the great-grandfather who died before he was born and the sister his mother miscarried as people he met and spoke to, they are persuaded that he saw something real.