Merry Christmas! But sorry, I think you must have been bad because all I have to offer you is this new Walmart commercial starring Walton Goggins, aka the Ghoul from Amazon’s Fallout series, in a crass attempt to cash in on millennial nostalgia for that Jim Carrey Grinch movie.
Yup, Walton Goggins took what I assume was a sizeable paycheck to star in a new, very expensive-looking Walmart ad that is clearly inspired by Dr. Seuss’ holiday classic How The Grinch Stole Christmas, and more specifically by the 2000 film adaptation starring Jim Carrey. (Nobody tell Amazon that Goggins is in a Walmart ad!) Goggins not only looks like Carrey’s Grinch, but even (mostly) does a solid impersonation of the comedian’s famous portrayal of the Christmas-hating monster. Here’s the ad:
It’s better than the animated movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch,that you likely forgot even got made, but come on, Goggins. How much money do you need? Really, I can spot you a fifty if that helps you avoid shit like this.
Pete Davidson is predicting that Walton Goggins will be the next on the rise celebrity that the internet will “turn” on, similar to what he says has happened to Pedro Pascal.
The former Saturday Night Live cast member appeared on Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast, where they discussed how Hollywood can “build you up,” which can sometimes lead to a fall from grace in the eyes of fans. Davidson specifically cited Pascal as an example of an actor who has endured a sudden shift in public perception.
“Look at Pedro Pascal right now. Fucking two years ago he’s a hardworking, great actor … He’s worked so hard and has been a struggling actor, [then] fucking blows up so fucking hard, everyone’s like, ‘Daddy, daddy! Yeah, daddy, daddy,’” he said. “And then a year later, he’s, like, in everything now ’cause he’s hot and big and everyone’s like, ‘Go the fuck away, dude.’”
Davidson continued, arguing that “you got to give someone time to adjust to that new level of fame. He’s been banging at it for 30 years, and now he’s learning how to go get a cup of coffee or deal with someone that taps you on the shoulder while you have your earbuds in and freaks you out. You got to give that guy a fucking second to, like, adjust.”
He then threw out The White Lotus star as the next actor who may endure similar treatment to that of Pascal.
“They’re gonna do it with Walton Goggins, [he] will be next,” he predicted. “It’s like, we build everybody up and now it’s so fast to turn. It’s within months.”
Davidson himself endured a swift rise to acclaim, and he hasn’t shied away from calling the media out for its “sexualization” of him following his relationship with Ariana Grande.
“I brought a lot of pop culture into the show, and I made it sort of a tabloid-y, trendy thing and I was embarrassed by it,” he said of his time on SNL. “Nobody talked about any of the work I was doing, they were like, ‘Oh, that’s the fuck stick.’ That hurt.”
Most people plan to show up for a new job well-prepared—but few are as ready for action as Walton Goggins was for Fallout. In a new interview, the actor talked about how he crafted his Emmy-nominated performance, bringing layers of nuance and complexity to a character that starts off in the show’s timeline as a 1950s movie cowboy, then pops up hundreds of years later as a noseless outlaw roaming the nuclear wastelands.
Speaking to Vulture, Goggins—a veteran actor who’s long been crafting memorable characters on TV (Justified, Deadwood, The Righteous Gemstones, The Shield, Invincible) and in movies (Predators, The Hateful Eight, Ant-Man and the Wasp)—gave a peek inside his acting process. To say it’s both thorough and detail-obsessed would be an understatement.
“[I] watched a lot of movies that I have seen before in preparation for this, really kind of looking not so much for the Ghoul, even though that was a part of it, but Cooper Howard. He is a 1950s western-movie star. So I really wanted to understand who his contemporaries were. What jobs did he lose out on? What jobs did he get?,” Goggins told Vulture.
He thought about Howard’s path to Hollywood stardom—in Goggins’ mind, he was a charismatic guy who was good at riding horses and just sort of fell into show biz—and studied, in particular, Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West and Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He also read the Fallout script 250 times, something he learned to do from former co-star Anthony Hopkins, and that helps him absorb the material intuitively: “Your ego really has to get out of the way.”
To get into the Ghoul’s mindset specifically, Goggins really focused on the mental transformation Howard went thorough all those years in the post-apocalypse. “Whenever you say, on paper, Oh, he’s been alive for 200 years. That’s hard to wrap your head around,” Goggins said.
He continued. “I don’t think about it in those terms. It’s like, let’s break down these 200 years. What does that really look like? Day one: What happened in the moment after the bomb dropped? Did he wake up five days later? Did he get up immediately? … Then I thought, what was it like the first time somebody tried to kill him for food or water, for resources? Right? What was it like the first day he had to kill someone for those very things? And the disintegration of a true morality—what is your true north? And the disintegration of everything he knew. He comes from a moral into an amoral existence.”
Fallout season one is now streaming on Prime Video; the Ghoul’s journey will continue in season two.
Amazon’sFallout TV series is considered a huge success by critics and fans alike, and has already been renewed for a second season! While season one was amazing, it left us with some burning questions that season two needs to answer.
1. What’s the deal with Lee Moldaver?
(Prime Video)
TMS‘ Sarah Barrett touches on many of the questions viewers have about Lee Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury). Namely, how the heck has she survived intact since before the Great War? Cooper Howard is now a ghoul. Hank MacLean was a Vault-Tec employee frozen in a cryopod, as was every Vault 33 overseer. So, where does Moldaver fit into all this? She’s clearly not a ghoul, so she must have been frozen at some point. But where, how, and by whom?
Also, what’s her connection to the New California Republic? Was she one of the founders of the NCR and Shady Sands?
And lastly, what was the nature of her relationship with Lucy’s mother, Rose? Whether romantic or platonic, their relationship seemed to be a close one. Moldaver knew Rose well enough to speak knowledgeably about the kind of person she was and to recognize the same qualities in Lucy. As Barrett asks in her piece, if they were so close, how could Moldaver then allow such violence to come to Rose’s children while planning the attack and fake marriage at Vault 33? Children she knew when they were younger. Did she believe they would be strong and smart enough to survive and count on that? Or have her feelings about them turned sour over the years she’s lived with Rose as a feral ghoul?
Moldaver is dead, but in Fallout‘s world, death may only be temporary. I hope we get more information about Lee Moldaver as the show continues.
2. Does Norm get into a pod?
(Prime Video)
When we last see Norm MacLean (Moisés Arias), he’s been trapped in Vault 31 by Brain-on-a-Roomba Bud Askins (Michael Esper) after learning the truth about the nature of the Vault 31-32-33 relationship: Vault 31 is where Vault-Tec managers are kept frozen to act as overseers for the other two vaults, and Vault 32 and 33 are breeding pools designed to breed future managers to rebuild civilization in Vault-Tec’s image.
Bud suggests that, since he won’t let Norm leave Vault 31, Norm should get into his father’s cryopod to ride out the apocalypse until vault-dwellers can return to the surface. We see Norm step toward the cryopods with a worried expression … but we don’t see him climb in it and freeze himself.
From the start of the show, Norm has been a contrary character. When others go left, he goes right. When his family tries to start a book club, he plays games on his Pip-Boy instead. And when the Vault 33 council accuses him of “lacking enthusiasm,” he doesn’t exactly try to change that impression.
Hell, he’s in Vault 31 in the first place because, like his sister, he couldn’t let his questions rest. Though others warned him to forget what he saw in Vault 32, he had to keep investigating. So, it doesn’t seem likely that Norm would willingly freeze himself just because Bud tells him. Especially since Bud isn’t necessarily a physical threat. I predict that Norm will try to outsmart Bud and reach Vault 32 to get help from Chet (Dave Register) and Woody (Zach Cherry) to overthrow the Vault-Tec leadership.
Either way, we need to find out what happened to Norm!
3. What’s the status of the New California Republic?
(Prime Video)
As I mentioned in my piece about the Fallout season one finale, just because Shady Sands was destroyed doesn’t mean that the NCR is no more. Lucy passes a billboard where Shady Sands is touted as “the first” capital of the NCR, meaning that the capital has changed. Meanwhile, Bethesda’s Todd Howard has confirmed that not only is the Fallout series canon, but that the events of “Fallout: New Vegas” happened, and that the “fall of Shady Sands” doesn’t necessarily refer to Hank and Vault-Tec bombing it.
In the Fallout games, the NCR became a bloated organization that had trouble managing its holdings. Communication is tricky when all you have are holo-tapes, a janky computer terminal system for inter-departmental mail, and word of mouth. It would stand to reason that, Shady Sands or no Shady Sands, the NCR still exists. Weaker perhaps, but still in existence. After all, Moldaver is still flying the flag and working out of NCR headquarters at the Griffith Observatory.
With season two likely taking us to New Vegas, we’ll surely learn more about the NCR in season two!
4. What happened to Mr. House after “New Vegas?”
(Prime Video/Bethesda Game Studios)
Fallout viewers learned that fan-favorite game villain Mr. House (Ravi Silver) was at the Vault-Tec apocalypse-planning meeting in the season finale. Gamers know that he survived by putting his consciousness into a robot. House then controls New Vegas (at least at the time of Fallout: New Vegas), which takes place 15 years before the TV series. Since New Vegas is still standing in the show’s timeline, many players believe that this makes the game-ending where Mr. House wins the canonical ending.
But did New Vegas’ survival require Mr. House? Will the New Vegas that Hank walks into in his stolen power armor be the same New Vegas of the game, or will 15 years have changed it significantly? Will Mr. House appear in the present-day timeline of Fallout season two? How will the show address his backstory if he does? Or, does Mr. House have an even more frightening and mysterious successor whom we’ll meet as a new character? Inquiring robo-brains want to know.
5. What happened to Cooper Howard’s family?
(Prime Video)
We know that Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) was the spokesperson for Vault-Tec and the origin of the “Vault Boy” logo. Howard, his wife Barb (Frances Turner), and their daughter Janey (Teagan Meredith) were guaranteed a spot in a management vault. After discovering his wife’s betrayal, they were divorced and Cooper started working as an entertainer at children’s birthday parties. Cooper and Janey are working a party gig when the first bombs drop, and when we meet Cooper 200 years later he’s become The Ghoul. But what happened during those lost years?
How did he lose his spot in a vault? Did Barb and their daughter get into one? When the bombs fell, did Cooper take Janey to a vault, or somewhere else? Did he still think he had a spot in a vault only to be turned away? Did he get into a vault, but eventually leave? Did Vault-Tec make him a ghoul?
When he confronts Hank toward the end of the Fallout season finale, he asks him “Where’s my f*cking family?” He expects Hank to know, meaning there’s a good chance they’re still alive. Perhaps they’re in Vault 31. Or maybe they’ve since been thawed and located elsewhere. Regardless of their whereabouts, The Ghoul is a fan-favorite character on the show, and we want him to get answers!
Speculation is an extremely fun pastime when it comes to genre shows. That’s why they call it “speculative fiction.” And we’ll have to entertain ourselves with a lot of speculating until Fallout returns to Prime Video for its second season … whenever that will be.
(featured image: JoJo Whilden/Prime Video)
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Fallout’s a pretty good show, and one of the big reasons why is the ever-reliable Walton Goggins. As the Ghoul—or Cooper Howard, once upon a time—he’s a menace to Lucy and everyone else throughout the season, while being enjoyable to watch both in the irradiated present and the pre-nuclear past. Creating him and others like him took some time, partially because they are and aren’t like anything else you’ve seen before on TV.
Will the Fallout TV Series Radiate the Tone of the Video Games?
Talking to Polygon, associate costume designer Amy Westcot explained how the costuming team concepted different “ghoulness” stages, of which there are “so many different degrees.” In the games, ghouls can exist as an average person with the right meds, otherwise they become Feral and attack basically anything that moves. They’re that world’s zombie equivalent, just in two different flavors where one is “kind of on their way out” and considerably deadlier. But watching ghouls go from normal to Feral isn’t a pleasant experience, one the show’s creators clearly wanted to make as clear as possible.
For the show, keeping the ghouls in a mostly human state was “super important,” particularly as it pertains to their humanity. Westcott revealed the costuming department worked hard with the textile team to make sure they looked right for their age while still garnering sympathy from the audience. “These were people once, and that was important to remember—even the Feral ghouls,” she noted. “They were supposed to be in rags, but…you get some remnant that they were a person once, and I think that we all empathize with them as well.”
In the case of the Ghoul, Westcott said that he couldn’t help but be the least grotesque of the bunch we see. Throughout the season, we see him guzzle down those aforementioned meds, which enable him to “still [have] his wits about him” and stand out from the other ghouls. He’s not fully one way or the other, but it was vital to have him seem like a regular (albeit irradiated) person while also “at a stage of ghoulness, [he just] couldn’t be Feral.” With a second season in the cards, it may be that he ends up sliding closer into Feral territory.
The first season of Fallout is fully available to watch over on Prime Video.
Yeah, he can have all my caps. Photo: Prime Video/YouTube
Ella Purnell’s time on Yellowjackets may be over, but she’s ready to set the world on fire in a new series for Amazon. Purnell joins Walton Goggins and Aaron Motenas the stars of a new show based on the long-running Fallout video-game franchise. Set in a dieselpunk post-nuclear wasteland, the Fallout games explore issues of morality, strategy, and how much Mad Max can inspire a work before you have to give out an associate-producer credit.
Bethesda director Todd Howard said on the Lex Fridman podcast that the show won’t directly adapt any of the games, but instead will go off-map. “For this, it was ‘Let’s do something that exists in the world of Fallout.’ It’s not retelling a game’s story. It’s basically an area of the map and like, Let’s tell a story here that fits in the world we built and doesn’t break any of the rules,” he said. “It can reference things in the games, but isn’t a retelling of the games. It exists in the same world, but it’s its own unique thing, so it adds to it.” Varietysays that Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan will executive produce, fresh from Westworld getting sent to the Valley Beyond by HBO.
Various Fallout games have taken place in the irradiated ruins of California, West Virginia, Las Vegas, Boston, and Washington, D.C. Prime Video released a tweet showing people in jumpsuits for Vault 33, which has been identified as part of Los Angeles. Within the games, LA is known as the Boneyard. By 2296 (when the series takes place), the Boneyard has been “civilized” under the New Californian Republic’s flag for years. The Fallout series takes place after all the games, whose timelines give Jeremy Bearimy a run for its money (Fallout Shelter is Tuesdays, and also July, and sometimes never).
Per Variety, Purnell will be playing an “upbeat and uncannily direct” woman, with all-American gumption and a dangerous twinkle in her eye. That describes almost every female NPC in the games. Empirereports that Purnell will be a vault-dweller leaving her safe shelter for the first time ever. Aaron Moten will be playing Maximus, a member of the Brotherhood of Steel (like…techno-monks?). According to Deadline, Goggins is playing a ghoul — humans whose flesh has melted off owing to nuclear radiation. But an upside? They’re essentially immortal. At the show’s March 6 press conference, the crew revealed Goggins’s ghoul is known only as the Ghoul. “The Ghoul is, in some ways, the poet Virgil in Dante’s Inferno. He’s the guide, if you will, through this irradiated hellscape that we find ourselves in in this post-apocalyptic world,” Goggins said. Pre-Great War, the Ghoul was known as Cooper Howard, and he acted as spokesman for Vault-Tec, the shady corporation that built the series’s iconic vaults.
All three will be searching for the same MacGuffin. “We talked a lot about The Good, The Bad And The Ugly,” co-creator Graham Wagner told Empire. “That’s three characters in search of a box of gold, so we asked ourselves, ‘What’s the gold in this world?’” Chris Parnell, Michael Emerson, Zach Cherry, Kyle MacLachlan and Xelia Mendes-Jones have also been cast as series regulars.
Hopefully not. The crew made a point at the March 6 press conference to talk about how cathartic it is working on an apocalyptic show with a sense of humor. “I think you also have a moment that we’re in right now in which the world, you know, it seems to be evermore frightening and dour,” said executive producer and director Jonathan Nolan. “And so an opportunity for us to work on a show that gets to look that in the eye, right, and we get to talk about the end of the world, but to do it with a sense of humor. There’s a thread of optimism woven into the show.”
Fallout comes to Prime Video a few days earlier than anticipated. On Monday, they announced the show will be streaming all eight episodes on April 10, 2024.
Last year, I caused a bit of a ruckus by saying the fashion at The Game Awards was indicative of the industry’s identity crisis. I lamented the t-shirt and blazer uniform and begged the men of the industry to do better. And though I said this not long before the 2022 awards show was set to kick off, it was clear that even in those few days, gaming’s biggest names scrambled to make sure they pleased one relatively unknown woman from New York.
Ahead of this year’s awards, I offered unsolicited fashion advice to try and ensure the awards ceremony felt as glitzy and as glamorous as host Geoff Keighley wants it to be. I even dressed a few of the attendees myself. But despite all that, I wasn’t sure what kind of looks we’d see when The Game Awards 2023 livestream kicked off on December 7.
This year, I attended the awards in-person, and had quite a few people tell me face-to-face that I singlehandedly made the attendees step up their fashion game. There was so much style both on and off the stage at the Peacock Theater last night, with dozens of people donning sequins and sparkles and Barbie-pink gowns and bright suit sets and funky accessories and sky-high heels. It truly was a feast for the eyes. Hell, Geoff dressed so well this year that someone dropped an f-bomb on stage over it.
So, I decided, just like last year, to gather some of the best-dressed attendees of The Game Awards 2023. Some of them were on-stage, many were off, all were fabulous. Click through to see who made the cut. You’re all beautiful.
Roadside Attractions has released the trailer for “Dreamin’ Wild”, the upcoming biographical music-drama that tells a moving story about prevailing against all odds.
Based on the true story of love and redemption, “Dreamin’ Wild” is “about what happened to singer/songwriter Donnie Emerson and his family when the album he and his brother recorded as teens was rediscovered after thirty years of obscurity and was suddenly hailed by music critics as a lost masterpiece,” as per the official synopsis. “While the album’s rediscovery brings hopes of second chances, it also brings long-buried emotions as Donnie (Casey Affleck), his wife Nancy (Zooey Deschanel), brother Joe (Walton Goggins), and father Don Sr. (Beau Bridges) come to terms with the past and their newly found fame.
Casey Affleck as Donnie Emerson and Zooey Deschanel as Nancy in “Dreamin’ Wild”.
— Photo: Courtesy of Roadside Attractions Casey Affleck as Donnie Emerson and Chris Messina as Matt Sullivan in “Dreamin’ Wild”.
— Photo: Courtesy of Roadside Attractions Walton Goggins, Beau Bridges, Barbara Deering, Casey Affleck and Chris Messina in “Dreamin’ Wild”.
— Photo: Courtesy of Roadside Attractions
Academy award-winning Affleck stars as the adult version of Donnie while Noah Jupe portrays teenage Donnie. Jack Dylan Grazer also stars in the film as teenage Joe, plus Chris Messina, whose character discovers the 1979 debut album in the film.
“It really just blew my mind,” Messina says of Dreamin’ Wild in the trailer.
Casey Affleck as Donnie Emerson in “Dreamin’ Wild”.
— Photo: Courtesy of Roadside Attractions Casey Affleck as Donnie Emerson and Zooey Deschanel as Nancy in “Dreamin’ Wild”.
— Photo: Courtesy of Roadside Attractions
Written and directed by Academy award-winner and Emmy-nominated, Bill Pohlad, the film features original music by Donnie Emerson, including the song “Baby”, which was originally released in ’79 and now has over 30 million+ streams on Spotify.
The soundtrack for “Dreamin’ Wild” will be available via Light in the Attic on digital on August 4, along with a re-release of the original 1979 Dreamin’ Wild album and the collection Still Dreamin’ Wild: The Lost Recordings1979-81.
Welcome toAlways Great, a new Awards Insider column in which we speak with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this entry, Walton Goggins talks about his memorable roles on TV favorites like The Shield, Justified, and George & Tammy—as well as everything in between.
When Walton Goggins first auditioned for Quentin Tarantino a little over a decade ago, he was asked to pick between a few Django Unchained characters. He chose one; he performed it well. Then Tarantino started wrapping things up, but Goggins said he wasn’t leaving—he told the iconic director that he was going to read every role on those script pages. “I said, ‘Man, I don’t even care if I get this job, I don’t care if I get to work with you—I’m here with you now, and I’m getting to say your words. I’m going to say as many words as I possibly can,’” Goggins says. “He could have easily said, ‘All right, dude, you’ve got to get out of here.’ But I stayed in there for another 45 minutes reading [maybe] 10 scenes. He not only let me do it—he celebrated it, and he read every other role in the scene with me.”
Goggins ultimately secured the small, memorable part of the malevolent Billy Crash in the Oscar-winning epic, a collaboration that’d lead to a meatier role in Tarantino’s next film, The Hateful Eight. The auditioning experience also speaks to Goggins’s unique tenacity as a performer—willing to go big, to try anything and give himself a real shot. Fame never really interested him; the idea of building a career had barely taken shape by the time he moved to LA from the South in the early ’90s to make a go at acting professionally. “I genuinely just wanted to understand what it was I was trying to ask myself to do—I was ready for a big life adventure,” he says—speaking to the memory of deciding to make a life out of performance. But the sentiment extends decades later to that moment standing opposite Tarantino too.
Like any young unknown, Goggins came up against typecasting and limited opportunities in his early years. In his wild, Emmy-nominated ride—through beloved TV series like Justified and The Shield; gonzo comic detours in Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones; and now, shifts between rich smaller parts in major projects (George & Tammy) and true lead roles (the upcoming Fallout)—he’s proven that sometimes, it takes very nicely not taking no for an answer to prove just how far you can go.
Born in Alabama and raised in Georgia, Goggins left college at 19 and drove across the country with his father to start his new life. The trip took 10 days, and by the time he’d reached the outskirts of Los Angeles County, he felt overwhelmed by the world he was walking into. “Storytelling and acting was always my passion, but I didn’t even want to be good at it—I just really wanted to understand it,” he says. He scraped together guest-acting gigs, and worked however he could to break through. One piece of advice, shared with him on a set, stuck most firmly: “You see this camera? This camera is your friend. It’s not something to be intimidated by…. There’s no magic to it.”
It’s not hard to see how that resonated with him—if nothing else, Goggins is never an actor who seems intimidated by the demands of the day. He goes there, catching everything with his eyes and never reacting like you’d expect. At 24 years old, he nabbed a colorful small part in the Robert Duvall vehicle The Apostle, as a deeply lonely young man who gets saved by a preacher. It’s a bold performance that announces a fresh talent. “I had people whispering in my ear, ‘This is your shot, man; you’re going to be something; you’re going to work,’” Goggins says. “Then I remember getting so fucking caught up in my own insecurity, and I was asking this producer, ‘I need to get a publicist? How do I capitalize on this? What do I do? Oh, my God, it’s going to be my one shot and it’s going to be over.’” The producer replied calmly that getting a spotlight in an Oscar-nominated Duvall movie was the win for Goggins—and that if he didn’t carry that over into whatever came next, a lot of heartache and disappointment awaited.
Good advice, since for many years, Goggins played more parts like this—standing out in substantial projects without necessarily being the face of the thing. In many of these situations, Goggins was cast as racists. “If you’re Italian from New York, you’re going to play a mobster; if you’re white from the South, you’re going to play a redneck,” Goggins says. “You have to work your way outside of that box, but at least you have a sandbox to actually play in.” When he was cast in FX’s acclaimed police drama The Shield as racist cop Shane Vendrell, he really got that room. Airing at the dawn of prestige serialized TV, it provided the unexpected—for basic cable, unprecedented, really—opportunity to chart a narrative arc over 80-plus episodes. Goggins played modes ranging from monstrous to devoted to tragic. “That defining moment is when you show up and you’re not auditioning for Redneck Number Two or Redneck Number Three,” he says. The moment had come.
Today is Thursday, Nov. 10, the 314th day of 2022. There are 51 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Nov. 10, 1775, the U.S. Marines were organized under authority of the Continental Congress.
On this date:
In 1871, journalist-explorer Henry M. Stanley found Scottish missionary David Livingstone, who had not been heard from for years, near Lake Tanganyika in central Africa.
In 1919, the American Legion opened its first national convention in Minneapolis.
In 1928, Hirohito (hee-roh-hee-toh) was enthroned as Emperor of Japan.
In 1944, during World War II, the ammunition ship USS Mount Hood (AE-11) exploded while moored at the Manus Naval Base in the Admiralty Islands in the South Pacific, leaving 45 confirmed dead and 327 missing and presumed dead.
In 1951, customer-dialed long-distance telephone service began as Mayor M. Leslie Denning of Englewood, New Jersey, called Alameda, California, Mayor Frank Osborne without operator assistance.
In 1954, the U.S. Marine Corps Memorial, depicting the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima in 1945, was dedicated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in Arlington, Virginia.
In 1969, the children’s educational program “Sesame Street” made its debut on National Educational Television (later PBS).
In 1975, the U.N. General Assembly approved a resolution equating Zionism with racism (the world body repealed the resolution in Dec. 1991).
In 1982, the newly finished Vietnam Veterans Memorial was opened to its first visitors in Washington, D.C., three days before its dedication. Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev died at age 75.
In 2005, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a former finance minister of Liberia, claimed victory in the country’s presidential election.
In 2009, John Allen Muhammad, mastermind of the 2002 sniper attacks that killed 10 in the Washington, D.C. region, was executed. President Barack Obama visited Fort Hood, Texas, where he somberly saluted the 13 Americans killed in a shooting rampage, and pledged that the killer would be “met with justice — in this world, and the next.”
In 2018, President Donald Trump, in France to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, canceled a visit to a cemetery east of Paris where Americans killed in that war are buried; rainy weather had grounded the presidential helicopter. Authorities in Northern California said 14 additional bodies had been found in the ruins from a fire that virtually destroyed the town of Paradise.
Ten years ago: Two people were killed when a powerful gas explosion rocked an Indianapolis neighborhood, damaging or destroying more than 80 homes. (Five people were later convicted of charges in connection with the blast, which prosecutors said stemmed from a plot to collect insurance money.)
Five years ago: Facing allegations of sexual misconduct, comedian Louis C.K. said the harassment claims by five women that were detailed in a New York Times report were true, and he expressed remorse for using his influence “irresponsibly.” The National Republican Senatorial committee ended its fundraising agreement with Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore in light of allegations of sexual contact with a teenager decades earlier. President Donald Trump arrived in Vietnam to attend an international economic summit, telling CEOs on the sidelines of the summit, “We are not going to let the United States be taken advantage of anymore.”
One year ago: Kyle Rittenhouse took the stand in his murder trial, testifying that he was under attack and acting in self-defense when he shot and killed two men and wounded a third during a turbulent night of street protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin. (Rittenhouse would be acquitted of all charges.) A judge in Michigan approved a $626 million settlement for Flint residents and others who were exposed to lead-contaminated water; most of the money would come from the state. A New Jersey gym owner, Scott Fairlamb, who punched a police officer during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, was sentenced to more than three years in prison. The government said prices for U.S. consumers jumped 6.2% in October compared with a year earlier, leaving families facing their highest inflation rate since 1990. Chris Stapleton was the big winner with six trophies including song and album of the year and Luke Combs claimed the biggest prize with entertainer of the year at the Country Music Association Awards.
Today’s Birthdays: Blues singer Bobby Rush is 88. Actor Albert Hall is 85. Country singer Donna Fargo is 81. Former Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., is 79. Lyricist Tim Rice is 78. Actor Jack Scalia is 72. Movie director Roland Emmerich is 67. Actor Matt Craven is 66. Actor-comedian Sinbad is 66. Actor Mackenzie Phillips is 63. Author Neil Gaiman (GAY’-mihn) is 62. Actor Vanessa Angel is 59. Actor Hugh Bonneville is 59. Actor-comedian Tommy Davidson is 59. Actor Michael Jai (jy) White is 58. Country singer Chris Cagle is 54. Actor-comedian Tracy Morgan is 54. Actor Ellen Pompeo (pahm-PAY’-oh) is 53. Actor-comedian Orny Adams is 52. Rapper U-God is 52. Rapper-producer Warren G is 52. Actor Walton Goggins is 51. Comedian-actor Chris Lilley is 48. Contemporary Christian singer Matt Maher is 48. Rock singer-musician Jim Adkins (Jimmy Eat World) is 47. Rapper Eve is 44. Rock musician Chris Joannou (joh-AN’-yoo) (Silverchair) is 43. Actor Heather Matarazzo is 40. Country singer Miranda Lambert is 39. Actor Josh Peck is 36. Pop singer Vinz Dery (Nico & Vinz) is 32. Actor Genevieve Buechner is 31. Actor Zoey Deutch (DOYCH) is 28. Actor Kiernan Shipka is 23. Actor Mackenzie Foy is 22.
