"640"

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.

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.

As so often happens in Hollywood, the most famous and beloved dance team in the history of movies was the result of a happy accident. The year was 1933, the studio was the financially strapped RKO, the film a Dolores Del Rio vehicle called “Flying Down to Rio.”

Buster became part of his parents’ act when he was just three, and the routine he did with his father made full use of the the tiny young boy’s uncanny flexibility. It involved young Buster goading his Dad to the point where the older man would knock the kid around the stage, or even throw him off it. A luggage handle was sown into young Buster’s costume to make it easier to toss him. The act was often billed as “The Little Boy Who Can’t Be Damaged.”

The automobile and its various offshoots, those gas-guzzling, defining innovations of the twentieth century, are as integral to movies as they are to our daily routines. Since films are the magic mirror held up to our everyday lives with, as Hitchcock said, “the dull bits left out,” this only makes sense.

Does the name Dick Smith ring a bell? Probably not, I’d guess. So you’ll be surprised when I tell you that Mr. Smith, who passed away on July 30th at age 92, was actually responsible for some of the most memorable and astonishing moments in American film. His area of expertise: the unsung art of movie makeup. Smith — a Yale graduate who’d originally wanted to become a dentist — was a veteran of both TV and films. On the small screen, he worked on the campy sixties horror soap, “Dark Shadows,” and was Emmy-nominated four times, winning one for transforming a then-young Hal Holbrook into a considerably older Mark Twain in 1967’s “Mark Twain Tonight!”

One thing I love about movies is their ability to make you feel emotions you don’t generally experience in day to day life, like pulse-pounding terror.

In need of a laugh? Aren’t we all? That simple truth explains why there is nothing better than a consistently funny movie. Given the tricky, delicate nature of comedy, I’d also claim there are few things worse than a movie that tries to be funny but isn’t. It’s hardly surprising that there are many more comedies out there of the latter variety.