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The History of American Cinema: 1989

30/1 -

A new print of Gone with the Wind (1939) with the colour restored premieres in New York [ADD]

16/2 -

Jane Fonda divorces her husband, Tom Hayden, amidst rumours that he is having an affair with actress Morgan Fairchild. [ADD]

1/3 -

The conviction of Randall Dale Adams, the subject of last year’s documentary The Thin Blue Line, is overturned by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. [ADD]

6/3 -

The Museum of Modern Art pays tribute to Marin Karmitz, the head of MK2, by screening 10 films produced by him. [ADD]

29/3 -

Barry Levinson’s Rain Man wins the Best Picture Oscar at the 61st Annual Academy Awards ceremony. [MORE]

18/4 -

Jack Nicholson begins shooting The Two Jakes, the sequel to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), in which he reprises his role as private eye Jake Gittes. [ADD]

21/4 -

Phil Alden Robinson's Field of Dreams, an adaptation of the W. P. Kinsella tale Shoeless Joe, is released.   Kevin Costner stars as an Iowa farmer who is inspired to turn part of a cornfield into a baseball pitch on which he hopes the spirits of past baseball greats will play.   Burt Lancaster, James Earl Jones, Ray Liotta and Amy Madigan also star. [ADD]

2/6 -

Peter Weir’s film Dead Poet’s Society, his first in three years, is released.   Robin Williams stars as an unconventional English teacher at a stuffy Vermont school in 1959 who inspires his pupils to ‘seize the day.’ [ADD]

19/6 -

Tim Burton’s adaptation of Batman premieres at Westwood.   Michael Keaton plays the masked crusader, with Kim Basinger as Vicky Vale and Jack Nicholson as Batman’s nemesis, the Joker.   It becomes the highest-grossing movie of 1989. [ADD]

21/6 -

Herman J Mankiewicz’s scripts for Citizen Kane and The American are sold for $231,000 at Christie’s auction house in New York. [ADD]

24/6 -

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the third film in the Indiana Jones franchise, sees 59-year-old Sean Connery playing 47-year-old Harrison Ford’s father in a battle with the Nazis to find the Holy Grail.   River Phoenix plays the young Indy in the film’s opening sequence. [ADD]

30/6 -

Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee’s follow up to his debut feature She’s Gotta Have It, is released.   The film follows the residents of a Brooklyn neighbourhood during one sweltering summer day which culminates in a race riot.   The talented cast, led by Lee, includes Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Richard Edson, Bill Nunn, John Turturro, Robin Harris, John Savage, Samuel L. Jackson, Rosie Perez and Martin Lawrence. [ADD]

6/7 -

Randall Dale Adams, the subject of Errol Morris’s documentary film The Thin Blue Line, begins legal action against Morris to regain the rights to his story. [ADD]

7/7 -

Concern is raised over a run of fatal helicopter accidents on overseas movie sets allegedly caused by pilots who are not stunt-qualified. [ADD]

10/7 -

Mel Blanc, the voice behind the Warner Bros cartoon characters Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Yosemite Sam, and Tweety and Sylvester, dies in Los Angeles of heart disease at the age of 81.   Blanc voiced over 3,000 cartoons during a career spanning 60 years. [ADD]

12/7 -

Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally is released.   Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal star as friends who are destined to become lovers despite Ryan’s assertion that men and women can share a friendship without sex rearing its head. [ADD]

31/7 -

Reports circulate about the existence of a pornographic home movie made with an underage girl by actor Rob Lowe. [ADD]

18/8 -

Brian De Palma's Vietnam war film Casualties of War is released.   Michael J. Fox stars as a soldier attempting to protect a captive Vietnamese girl (Thuy Thu Le) from being raped by his comrades, led by Sean Penn. [ADD]

13/9 -

Steve Kloves’ The Fabulous Baker Boys sees real-life bothers Beau and Jeff Bridges playing a nightclub piano act whose fortunes take a turn for the better when they hire sexy Michelle Pfeiffer as their singer. [ADD]

15/9 -

Sea of Love, Al Pacino’s first film since the box-office disaster Revolution (1985), is released.   Directed by Harold Becker, Pacino plays a cop investigating a series of murders of former boyfriends of Ellen Barkin. [ADD]

13/10 -

Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors is released.   Allen also appears alongside Martin Landau, Alan Alda, Mia Farrow, Anjelica Huston and Sam Waterston. [ADD]

8/11 -

Kenneth Branagh’s screen adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Henry V is released.   Branagh also plays the title role. [ADD]

19/11 -

The first American Festival of French Films is opened in Sarasota by Audrey Hepburn. [ADD]

25/11 -

Japanese company Sony acquire Columbia Pictures for $3 billion.   Producers Jon Peters and Peter Gruber are chosen to head the studio. [ADD]

1/12 -

Turner Broadcasting System licenses 1,000 feature films from Columbia Pictures Television for screening on the cable TV channel TNT. [ADD]

10/12 -

Danny DeVito’s The War of the Roses, in which Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner play a once-loving married couple now at war with each other, is the highest grossing movie of the week. [ADD]

20/12 -

Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July, in which Tom Cruise plays on his All-American good looks to emphasise the toll taken on the youth sent to the Vietnam war, is released.   Cruise plays Ron Kovic, a gung-ho patriot crippled in the conflict and turned into an anti-war activist by his subsequent experiences. [ADD]

20/12 -

Jessica Lange stars in Costa-Gavras’s Music Box as a lawyer who defends her own father against charges of Nazi war crimes. [ADD]

– Total box office receipts for 1989 top $5 billion for the first time. [ADD]

– Amy Heckerling’s Look Who’s Talking becomes the most financially successful film ever directed by a woman. [ADD]

– Euzhan Palcy becomes the first black female filmmaker to direct an all-star Hollywood movie when she makes A Dry White Season. [ADD]

– A Screen Actors Guild survey reveals that although women make up 42.6% of SAG membership, they account for only 31.5% of total SAG earnings. [ADD]

– Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas claims that Michael Ovitz threatened ‘my foot soldiers… will blow your brains out,’ when trying to ‘persuade’ the writer to stay with Ovitz’s Creative Artists Agency. [ADD]

Other Key American Films of 1989

Black Rain (Ridley Scott) [ADD]

Breaking In (Bill Forsyth) [ADD]

Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (Robert Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman) [ADD]

Enemies: A Love Story (Paul Mazursky) [ADD]

Glory (Edward Zwick) [ADD]

Lethal Weapon 2 (Richard Donner) [ADD]

Mystery Train (Jim Jarmusch) [ADD]