John Huston was an American film director, screenwriter and actor. He received 15 Oscar nominations and directed both his father and daughter to Oscar wins in different films. Huston worked as an amateur boxer, reporter, short-story writer and a World War 2 documentary filmmaker. Huston worked as a fine art painter early on in his career before becoming a film director. His visual style from his paintings helped his film career as Huston did very little post-production and preferred to shoot his films all at once which helped to save lots of money for the film studios. He wrote the screenplays for most of the films that he directed and most of these films have become Hollywood classics including such films as ‘The Maltese Falcon’, ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’, ‘Moulin Rouge’, ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ and ‘Moby Dick’.

Toward the end of his career; he also began to act in various films. He was nominated for an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for his role in the film ‘The Cardinal’. Many of Huston’s films involved themes that discussed the human condition and how human beings react to being put in impossible situations. Many of his films involved heroic quests or love stories that didn’t have a Hollywood happy ending but instead ended with the actors being unsatisfied in the outcome. Other film critics thought that Huston preferred to write and direct about the underdog as being the protagonist in his films. By his own admission, Huston cared little for what made film audiences satisfied. In this month’s quote, Huston discusses the difficulty in figuring out what makes people like or dislike films…

“I Don’t Try to Guess What a Million People Will Like. It’s Hard Enough to Know What I Like.” – John Huston

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Vincent price was an American actor best known for his role in several low-budget horror films that he made at the end of his film career. Price would learn some of his acting skills while attending Yale and studying art history and fine art. He begun his acting career on-stage in the 1930s but soon made the transition to film in the 1940s. Price’s first venture into the horror genre was in the 1939 Boris Karloff film Tower of London. The following year he portrayed the title character in the film The Invisible Man Returns. In the 1950s, he started to do more horror films and appeared in such recognizable films as ‘House of Wax’, ‘The Fly’, ‘Return of the Fly’ and ‘The House on Haunted Hill’. In the 1960s, Price starred in several low-budget box office hits for director Roger Corman. Some of these films included adaptations from Edgar Allen Poe novels such as ‘The Raven’, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, ‘Tales of Terror’, and ‘Last man on Earth’.

In addition, Price would have several recognizable television roles in the 1960s by playing the villain ‘EggHead’ in the Batman television series and appearing as himself on the television game show ‘Hollywood Squares’. At the end of his career, Price would appear in a Canadian Children’s television program called ‘The Hilarious House of Frightenstein’ and do several voice-overs for music albums from musicians such as Alice Cooper and Michael Jackson. Price’s last significant appearance in a film was as the inventor in the film ‘Edward Scissorhands’. In this month’s quote (in Halloween tradition), we give the audience Price’s thoughts on the concept of all things scary…

“It’s as much fun to scare as to be scared.” – Vincent Price

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September’s quote of the month comes courtesy of Apple’s spiritual guru -Steve Jobs. Jobs has had many great charismatic and intelligent quotes on many topics throughout his career in the tech. industry. He was a designer and an inventor but will primarily be known as co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. Jobs was famously fired from Apple in the 1980s but would return in the 90s and help the company avoid declaring bankruptcy. Over the next several years , Jobs would help to design such innovative Apple products like the iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone and the iPad. In 2011, Apple would become the world’s most valuable publicly-traded company on the stock market.

In addition, Jobs bought The Graphics Group (later renamed Pixar) from Lucasfilm’s computer graphics division for the price of $10 million. The company would go on to create such entertaining and award-winning films such as Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Wall-E and Up. Jobs developed a love for electronics at an early age by helping his step-father fix radios and televisions in their garage. Jobs would go on to work for Atari and helped to develop the video game ‘Breakout’. Jobs left the company and worked with fellow inventor Steve Wozniak and helped to form ‘Apple’ which was given the name based on Jobs’ admiration for a summer job picking apples. The duo would go on to help build one of the world’s first personal computers. Many people who knew Jobs believed him to be a perfectionist and an egomaniac. Jobs didn’t care much for wealth and actually only paid himself 1$ a year in salary as Chairman of Apple Inc. Here is a great quote from Jobs on his belief in personal wealth…

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.” [The Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1993]” – Steve Jobs

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