Books - Reflecting On Celebrities of Old

RonPrice · 04-22-2006, 07:30 PM

THE NEW WORLD OF CELEBRITIES

The year I was eighteen, in 1962, Richard Burton had just begun a relationship, the epic romance of the century, with Elizabeth Taylor. Each would eventually divorce their spouses and in 1964 marry. By August 1962 when my pioneering life began, the film Cleopatra had been in the making for more than a year. Taylor and Burton were the first celebrities to have the paparazzi following them wherever they went. At least that was the way English actor-director Guy Masterson put it in an interview on ABC Radio National.

Film-makers in 1962-1963 were struggling to get a handle on the epic as an art form. During this struggle they tried Cleopatra, a film first screened in June 1963. Despite its many gargantuan flaws the film remains a compelling story of tremendous spectacle and power. The film went for four hours after being cut from six. It won four oscars. The film delivers visual spectacle on a scale few pictures can rival. By today’s standards the 44 million it cost 20th Century Fox to produce would be $400 million. Seven weeks before Cleopatra was first released in New York, the Universal House of Justice was elected. -Ron Price with thanks to Margaret Throsby, ABC Radio National, October 19th, 2004, 10:00-11:00 am and to the Movie Review Querie Engine(MRQE).

There was back then a romance
which was promised me with wonder.
I lived in hope that it would fulfill
the promptings of angels
and the voice in the thunder.

It had a beauty quite astounding,
one of the rarest in its day.
Men followed it to catch a glimpse
for it was a story that would pay.

I, too, followed it, for it was
a beauty that would live forever.
Mine was not that romance
they put in magazines
and epic films in
technicolour manipulation.

Mine was, rather, so exquisite
the media never tapped it.
It was not about the tribes of war
or wealth or indoor plumbing.
It had to do with man’s dear soul,
a nectar and a honeyed-tongue,
desert sand and mountain climb,
streaking across a firmament
of an indifferent and sleeping world
with my compass set for madness,
for orient lights, resplendent tokens
in always unreached and unseen heights.

Ron Price
October 27 2004