"60"

His name is seldom invoked today, but if you compiled any list of innovators who’d actually changed the shape of movies, it would have to include Saul Bass.

Few will ever forget this year’s Oscars, when Faye Dunaway read off the wrong card and mistakenly announced “La La Land” as Best Picture winner. Awkward as that was, there have been other memorably offbeat moments in Oscar history.

Today there are certainly bigger stars in Hollywood than Bill Murray, but few if any command the cult-like devotion and fascination that he does from his fans.

Actress Shirley MacLaine once observed: “An actor has many lives and many people within him. I know there are lots of people inside me. No one ever said I'm dull.” That’s for sure. Over the years, this irrepressible lady has sparked considerable bafflement and controversy over her outspoken views on reincarnation, extraterrestrials, and other New Age thinking.

I will always remember my middle son’s devotion to Doris Day movies when he was very young. This otherwise very rough-and-tumble kid would look at me on a rainy Saturday afternoon and ask quietly, “Got any more Doris?” This always amused me. I couldn’t help thinking that Doris Day seemed so far removed from the 21st century, belonging exclusively to that bygone era of clean movies, saccharine songs, and prescribed gender roles.

Tyrone Power: If ever a name sounded like the product of a studio publicity department, this was it. Yet this dark, impossibly handsome star (known to friends as “Ty”) used his own name, the same one carried by his actor father and his great-grandfather, also a famed actor in nineteenth-century Ireland.

When MGM head Louis B. Mayer authorized the then-princely sum of $75,000 to purchase the film rights to L. Frank Baum’s “Oz” children’s books in 1938, he knew he was in for a challenge. A couple of attempts had already been made to adapt the stories in the silent era, and had fallen flat. Still, Mayer had been impressed with the unexpected success of Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” the prior year, and wanted to match it.

In this relatively enlightened age, it’s horrifying to consider how gay people were treated by society just half a century ago. Back then, being closeted was not an option but a necessity. As the 1960s dawned, homosexuality was still deemed an illness and a crime across the globe. Those caught and convicted often went to prison, and then were ostracized, their lives ruined.

I was lucky enough to know Gene Wilder. That’s not to boast but to affirm a tired old cliché: to know him was to love him. He was surprisingly reserved, but once comfortable with you, he readily displayed that trademark twinkle. His keen wit and intelligence made him excellent company, and unlike some actors, he listened as intently as he spoke.