RIP Danilo Ratici

Danilo Rustici died, he was one of the founders of the Osanna

la Republica

by Antonio Tricomi

2/28/2021

A central figure of Italian progressive rock, a genre that established itself at the dawn of the 70s and still today an object of worship, Danilo Rustici, co-founder of Osanna, died at the age of 72. The musician had been hospitalized at Cadarelli following the worsening of his liver problems; but in the hospital, according to family and friends, he contracted Covid, which was fatal to him.

The words of his brother Corrado

The news of his death was given by his brother Corrado, another talented guitarist, one of the most popular on the contemporary scene, as well as his historical friend Lino Vairetti, co-founder of the band. Just a few days before his death, the documentary dedicated to the band, "Osannaples", shot by Deborah Farina, was presented. "There is a vastness beyond the remotest confines of the mind. That vastness is our home, that vastness is ourselves, thank you for all you gave me, for the genius you were, for your vision. Thank you for everything. Big brother, may I have the luck and honor of recognizing you again in that vastness where we are only love ", his brother Corrado wrote in a video on social media.

Career with the Osanna

Rustici contributed to the creation of albums such as "Man", "Palepoli" , "Landscape of life" and "Suddance", but at the same time he was also active on other fronts, both musical, with the formation of Uno ei Luna, and political being a leader of the Marxist-Leninist party. After a period in the US, I returned to Italy and so together with Vairetti he revived the band, recording "Taka Boom", but at the beginning of 2000 he was hit by a stroke as Vairetti recalls to Repubblica and his career suffered a halt.

The memory of Vairetti

It is the same adventure companion who wanted to remember him on social media: "The death of Danilo is really a great pain for me. Danilo was for me like a brother and even more. Between us there has always been an emotional and professional bond that has created not only this brotherhood, but also a artistic union of great value. Osanna was born thanks to the two of us who with stubbornness, and countertrend to the period in which the groups elaborated only covers of the great Anglo-Saxon rock, we laid the foundations to invent our own original path, with songs written by us with cultural and musical themes of great artistic value ". Vairetti speaks of Rustici as "a 'genius', a researcher of avant-garde sounds and was the most innovative guitarist in the entire music scene, even if this has not always been recognized.I affirm this with all my heart because he deserves to be remembered for the great talent he showed in every note and in his every gesture. He was the one who made me the first handmade synthesizer that I used in our first album 'L'Uomo' (…). Everyone will remember him as one of the greatest guitarists in the progressive-rock scene ".

 

RATICI, Danilo

Born: 1950, Italy,

Died: 2/27/2021, Naples, Campania, Italy

Danilo Ratici’s western – musician:

Stay Away from Trinity… When He Comes to Eldorado – 1972 [member of the band Osanna]

RIP Robert Alan Murray

 Alan Robert Murray, Two-Time Oscar-Winning Sound Editor, Dies at 66

The Hollywood Reporter

By Carolyn Giardina

February 25, 2021

Over more than 40 years, he worked on 32 films directed by Clint Eastwood, from 'Escape From Alcatraz' to 'Richard Jewell.'

Alan Robert Murray, the supervising sound editor and decades-long collaborator with Clint Eastwood who earned Oscars for his work on the director's American Sniper and Letters to Iwo Jima, died Wednesday, a source told The Hollywood Reporter. He was 66.

Last year, Murray set a sound editing record with his 10th career Academy Award nomination, for Todd Phillips' Joker. His first two noms came for his contributions to Richard Donner's Ladyhawke (1985) and Lethal Weapon 2 (1989).

Murray also received Oscar noms for the Eastwood-helmed films Space Cowboys (2000), Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Sully (2016) and for Chuck Russell's Eraser (1996) and Denis Villeneuve's Sicario (2015).

He worked on 32 films directed by Eastwood, from Escape From Alcatraz (1979) to Richard Jewell (2019), in a stretch that also included the best picture winners Unforgiven (1992) and Million Dollar Baby (2004).

In addition, he partnered with Eastwood on several others movies that the Hollywood legend produced and/or starred in, including Any Which Way You Can (1980), Tightrope (1984), The Dead Pool (1988) and Trouble With the Curve (2012).

Eastwood "has always been one who lets the artists bring what they can to the table," Murray said backstage at the Oscars after his win for American Sniper (2014). "He gives you specific notes but lets you create on your own. And he respects the artists on his crew."

Murray shared his Oscars with fellow supervising sound editor Bub Asman; they worked together on more than 50 films.

His extensive résumé also included The Warriors (1979), Star Trek the Motion Picture (1979), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), National Lampoon's Vacation (1983), Fatal Attraction (1987), Die Hard 2 (1990), New Jack City (1991), Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), Star Trek X: Nemesis (2002), The Legend of Zorro (2005) and A Star Is Born (2018). He helped Bradley Cooper get thorough his directorial debut on that last one after meeting the actor on American Sniper.

He also served as supervising sound editor on Taylor Sheridan's upcoming release For Those Who Wish Me Dead.

Murray began his career in the 1970 at Paramount, where he was mentored by Howard Beals, who worked with filmmakers from Cecil B. DeMille to Francis Ford Coppola. He had been based at Warner Bros. Sound since 1979.

Speaking with THR last year about his approach to Joker, Murray said he wanted to use realistic sounds. "It was more of following Arthur's descent into madness," he said. "Everything would start off normal, and then our sound effects reacted to what was going on with [the character]."

Survivors include his wife, Debbie, and three children working in motion pictures: Blu Murray, an editor; Kevin R.W. Murray, who works in sound; and Hailey Murray, who works in postproduction.

MURRAY, Alan Robert

Born: 1955

Died: 2/24/2021,Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.

 

Alan Robert Murray’s westerns – sound editor:

Bronco Billy – 1980

Zorro: The Gay Blade - 1981

Pale Rider - 1985

Unforgiven – 1992

South of Heave, West of Hell - 2000

The Legend of Zorro - 2005

Yellowstone (TV) – 2018

 

RIP Douglas Turner Ward

 

Douglas Turner Ward, Pioneer in Black Theater, Dies at 90

A founder of the Negro Ensemble Company in New York in the 1960s, he was outspoken about limited opportunities for fellow Black actors and directors.

New York Times

By Nathaniel G. Nesmith

February 22, 2021

Douglas Turner Ward, an actor, playwright and director who co-founded the celebrated Negro Ensemble Company, a New York theater group that supported Black writers and actors at a time when there were few opportunities for them, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.

The death was confirmed by his wife, Diana Ward.

Mr. Ward was establishing his own career as an actor in 1966 when he wrote an opinion article in The New York Times with the headline “American Theater: For Whites Only?”

“If any hope, outside of chance individual fortune, exists for Negro playwrights as a group — or, for that matter, Negro actors and other theater craftsman — the most immediate, pressing, practical, absolutely minimally essential active first step is the development of a permanent Negro repertory company of at least Off-Broadway size and dimension,” he wrote. “Not in the future … but now!”

The article got the attention of W. McNeil Lowry, the Ford Foundation’s vice president of humanities and the arts, who arranged a $434,000 grant to create precisely the kind of company that Mr. Ward was proposing. Thus the Negro Ensemble company was born, in 1967, with Mr. Ward as artistic director, Robert Hooks as executive director and Gerald S. Krone as administrative director.

The company went on to produce critically acclaimed productions, among them Joseph A. Walker’s “The River Niger” (1972), which won the Tony Award for best play in 1974 and was adapted for film in 1976. Mr. Ward not only directed the play but also acted in it, earning a Tony nomination for best featured actor in a play.

Other notable productions by the company included Samm-Art Williams’s “Home” (1979) and Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “A Soldier’s Play” (1981), about a Black officer investigating the murder of a Black sergeant at a Louisiana Army base during World War II, when the armed forces were segregated. The cast included Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson. (It, too, was adapted for film, as “A Soldier’s Story,” in 1984.)

Frank Rich of the The Times called the production, directed by Mr. Ward, “superlative.” (The play was revised last January on Broadway, starring Blair Underwood, before being forced to close because of the pandemic.)

The Negro Ensemble Company became — and continues to be — a training ground for Black actors, playwrights, directors, designers and technicians. Many of the troupe’s actors over the years went on to become stars, among them, in addition to Mr. Washington and Mr. Jackson, Angela Bassett, Louis Gossett Jr. and Phylicia Rashad.

The company, and Ford’s contribution, won immediate praise after its founding. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. said the grant represented “a magnificent step toward the creation of new and greater artists in the community,” and Roy Wilkins, the executive director of the N.A.A.C.P. at the time, said the foundation had “recognized the potential in the Negro theater” and the talent of “hundreds of actors and entertainers who have struggled individually.”

The company enabled Mr. Ward to solidify his own career as an actor and director.

“I love acting for the communal thing — you know, working with people,” he said in an interview with The Times in 1975. But directing, he added, “sort of happened to me.”

“I never had any intention of functioning as a director,” he continued, “but as the artistic director of the company, I choose the plays, and if I can’t find someone to direct them for us, I do it myself.”

One of the first plays he directed was Richard Wright and Louis Sapin’s “Daddy Goodness” (1968), about a town drunk in the rural South who falls into such a stupor that his friends think he is dead.

In an interview, Mr. Fuller said, “Doug is the only director I have worked with that could read any play and know whether its story line and characters would ‘work’ onstage.”

The Negro Ensemble Company was not immune to criticism, however. The founders were criticized early on for setting up their headquarters at the St. Mark’s Playhouse in Manhattan’s East Village rather than at a theater in Harlem, and for appointing a white administrator, Mr. Krone.

Roosevelt Ward Jr. was born on May 5, 1930, in Burnside, La., to Roosevelt and Dorothy (Short) Ward, impoverished farmers who owned their own tailoring business. His family moved to New Orleans when he was 8, and he attended Xavier University Preparatory School, a historically Black Roman Catholic institution.

Mr. Ward was admitted to Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1946, then transferred to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he studied politics and theater. He quit college at 19 and moved to New York City, where he met and befriended the playwrights Lorraine Hansberry and Mr. Elder.

In the late 1940s, Mr. Ward joined the Progressive Party and took to left-wing politics. He was arrested and convicted on charges of draft evasion and spent time in prison in New Orleans while his case was under appeal. After his conviction was overturned, he moved back to New York and became a journalist for the Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker.

He also began studying theater, joining the Paul Mann Actors Workshop and choosing the stage name Douglas Turner Ward, in homage to two men he admired: the abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Nat Turner, who led a revolt against slavery.

One of Mr. Ward’s first acting roles was in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” in 1956 at Circle in the Square in Manhattan; another was as an understudy in Ms. Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” on Broadway in 1959, with Sidney Poitier and Claudia McNeil in the lead roles.

 

WARD, Douglas Turner (Roosevelt Ward Jr.)

Born: 5/5/1930, Burnside, Louisiana, U.S.A.

Died: 2/20/2021, Manhattan, New York, U.S.A.

 

Douglas Turner Ward’s western – actor:

Man and Boy – 1971 (Christmas)