An Evening with Groucho

from:
http://www.archive.org/details/OTRR_An_Evening_With_Groucho_Singles

An Evening with Groucho is a look at the life of Groucho Marx and the Marx Brothers, as told by Groucho.

Groucho Marx Biography:

Born: October 2, 1890 in New York City, New York
Died: August 19, 1977 in Los Angeles, California

Groucho was born Julius Henry Marx on October 2, 1890 in New York. He was the third of the five surviving sons of Sam and Minnie Marx. He was the first of the brothers to start stage career aged 15 in an act called The Leroy Trio. Other acts followed, but none of them was a great success. Twice the other members of the act disappeared overnight and left him penniless in a town far away from home.

When his brothers came on stage, they finally had a success with the musical comedy called I'll Say She Is. It was at one of the performances of this show that Groucho got his painted moustache. He arrived late at the theater and used greasepaint to create a moustache. He found this so much easier than a glued on moustache that he insisted on using this technique from then on.

Always being a liberal, Groucho sometimes made critical remarks about politics and had friends which were regarded as communist by the US of the 1950s. This led to Groucho being investigated by the FBI.

When Marx Brothers became popular again in the last sixties/early seventies Groucho made a comeback with a show in Carnegie Hall in 1972. At the film festival in Cannes in 1972, he was made Commandeur des Arts et Lettres and in 1974 he received a special Academy Award for the achievements of the Marx Brothers.

Groucho died on August 19th, 1977 at Cedars Sinai Medical Center. His ashes are at Eden Memorial Park, San Fernando, California.

Armenians arriving to America

Armenian Community Opening from LaughingTree Films on Vimeo.

A short piece we produced, on Armenians immigrating to America. The entire segment focused mainly on California, but I'm really pleased with this opening.

The California Courier

This is a video I created giving a brief historical overview of The California Courier

The California Courier is an English-language Armenian weekly newspaper published since 1958 in USA. The current publisher of the weekly is Harut Sassounian.

In 1958, two young men in Fresno -- George Mason (Elmassian) and Reese Cleghorn -- had the foresight to publish an English-language newspaper, so that those unfamiliar with their native tongue could stay in touch with community news.
Cleghorn went on to become Professor and Dean of the School of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Mason continued publishing the Courier with his popular weekly opinion column titled, "This and That" and wrote amusing Armenian wisecracks under the rubric "Uncle Hadji" and "Dear Dickran."
After moving to Los Angeles and becoming a prominent stock broker, Mason employed a succession of part-time editors and stringers. The most colorful personality to run the paper was a Japanese-American by the name of Seico Hanashiro, who worked at the Fresno post office during the day and published the Courier from his garage in his spare time. In the process, Seico knew more about the Armenian community than did most Armenians!
In 1983, Mason hired as full time editor of the Courier a young man by the name of Harut Sassounian, who subsequently became the publisher of the newspaper and moved it from Fresno to Glendale.

http://www.archive.org/details/TheCaliforniaCourier