But judging from the clips available on YouTube, he appears to been something out of a pop culture design fantasy.

Bongiorno shot to fame in the 50's hosting the beloved Lascia o Raddoppia?, Italy's version of the $64,000. After that he went on to host a number of shows on Silvio Berlusconi's media empire, including, judging from the clips available on YouTube, an Italian version of Wheel of Fortune, something like an Italian Price Is Right set in a corn field, and another show that looks like an Italian Who Wants to Be a Millionaire set on a space station.

Overall, his ouevre appears to be what you'd get if Russ Meyer had art directed Bob Barker's career — which is more or less all the American public has been asking for all these years. Thank you Italy for at last making this dream come true; a shame we only realized it when it was too late.

Hughes wrote, directed, or produced some of the most beloved and influential films of the 1980s, from National Lampoon's Vacation through Planes, Trains, & Automobiles. He revolutionized family friendly live-action comedies in the 1990s. And despite his reputation as a retired recluse, he was credited under a pseudonym for work on both Maid in Manhattan and Drillbit Taylor in the 2000s.

But (the huge influence of Home Alone on a slightly younger generation aside) he'll obviously be best remembered, forever, for his still-beloved high school comedies. They were, and are, remarkable for a few reasons: strong female leads or supporting characters, a focus on a slightly idealized and exaggerated reality instead of peeking-in-the-girls-locker-room outrageousness, and, as we mentioned, class.

His movies dealt seriously, if not always realistically or positively, with class as experienced by, not coincidentally, public school teenagers growing up in the North Shore suburbs of Chicago. His rich suburban kids are neglected by parents more concerned with material goods than their children's well-being and his poor suburban kids are often just flat-out neglected or abused.

Hughes was raised in the Chicago suburbs, where he developed his loathing for (and, frankly, fixation on) the entitled trust fund kids."I knew kids that in the third grade would say, 'When I'm 18, I'm getting $22 million dollars.'" This never translated into political liberalism for Hughes (he shared that weird '80s pretend-counterculture conservatism with a lot of his talented comedian colleagues), but the consciousness of having not-so-much and being forced into dealing with those fascinating creatures who have too much underpins all his crucial '80s work.

So. Yes. Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, the gender-flipped (and superior) Some Kind of Wonderful, the still-hilarious Ferris Beuller's Day Off and The Breakfast Club—that's a pretty good legacy, and they're so ingrained in the popular culture that it's hardly worth it to exalt each one in detail.

The entirety of Pretty in Pink is available on YouTube, for now. The opening Ferris Bueller monologue remains a comic masterpiece.

Hughes began his career as a copywriter, sold jokes to Rodney Dangerfield, and eventually joined the National Lampoon staff. Despite his incredibly influence and obvious status as an auteur, he directed only eight films, from 1984 through 1991.

Schulberg was born in New York in 1914, but his father was powerful producer B.P. Schulberg, so Budd grew up in Hollywood, surrounded by silent film starlets. After college, he became a screenwriter and a communist (his parents were among the very few in the Hollywood executive class to hold left-wing sympathies). In 1939, he was assigned F. Scott Fitzgerald as a collaborator on a light campus b-movie romp. Instead of writing, Fitzgerald and Schulberg got drunk in New Hampshire.

In 1941, he wrote What Makes Sammy Run, his brilliant depiction of "the spirit of Horatio Alger gone mad." Lower East Side kid Sammy Glick goes from copy boy to powerful screenwriter/producer on the strength of his relentless ambition and conniving. It's the story of America's habit of rewarding the most sociopathic tendencies the country breeds into those unfortunate enough to be born without shit. It's Atlas Shrugged in reverse—Glick steals everything he "produces," and takes the money, and recognition for himself. It's never been filmed. That it came from the son of a Paramount executive was also something of a shock:

The novel did not endear Schulberg to [Louis B.] Mayer, who told B.P. that Budd should be deported. "He's a U.S. citizen," B.P. supposedly answered. "Where the hell are you gonna deport him? Catalina Island?"

(Of course, like so many other chronicles of the dark side of the American dream, it's become something of a how-to guide for real-life Glick types.)

When the US entered World War II, Schulberg ended up in the OSS, the intelligence-gathering precursor to the CIA. With John Ford's film unit, he documented the atrocities of the concentration camps, then personally arrested Leni Riefenstahl at her Austrian chalet.

After the war, Schulberg published The Disenchanted, his autobiographical novel about the Fitzgerald screenplay. Then, in 1951, he named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Richard Collins named Schulberg as a former party member first. Schulberg telegrammed the committee acknowledging his former membership and offering his full cooperation. In his self-serving testimony before the Committee, Schulberg said he left the party because it refused to break with the Soviet dictatorship, but, more damningly, he said the party had tried to influence his work.

I decided I would have to get away from this if I was ever to be a writer. I decided to leave the group, cut myself off, pay no more dues, listen to no more advice, indulge in no more literary discussions, and to go away from the Party, from Hollywood, and try to write a book, which is what I did.

It reads like Schulberg's decision to testify was borne as much out of his utter disillusionment with the Hollywood establishment as any sense of either patriotic duty or even self-preservation. But Schulberg named fifteen former Party members, including Ring Lardner, Jr. and Waldo Salt. He continued justifying his testimony for the rest of his life. The blacklisted writers "could have written books and plays," he said in 1982. The communists he named weren't truly concerned with the nation's social problems. They hadn't stood with him when he "was fighting the party." Schulberg eventually came around to the rather self-evident (in retrospect) idea that a congressional committee drafting a list of people no longer allowed to work in films was more of a threat to free speech than the party had ever been.

It was shortly after that that Shulberg collaborated with fellow name-namer Elia Kazan on his most enduring work: On The Waterfront, that brilliant paean to snitching. The story of how a chump ex-boxer and a crusading priest deal with corruption and mob control of the longshoreman is one of the greatest films ever made, and it cements Schulberg's place as an great American artists.

But it was his next collaboration with Kazan that we, personally, have always loved just a bit more, if only for its criminal underexposure: A Face In the Crowd is one of the best explorations of Popular American Demagoguery ever produced. Andy Griffith, playing the anti-Andy Taylor, is Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes, another relentlessly ambitious type, though this one hides his reactionary abusive streak behind a down-home country aw shucks persona. Rhodes goes from Will Rogers to Father Coughlin, becoming a hugely popular radio star until his contempt for his audience is revealed on-air.

Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers - everybody that's got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle. They don't know it yet, but they're all gonna be 'Fighters for Fuller'. They're mine! I own 'em! They think like I do. Only they're even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for 'em. Marcia, you just wait and see. I'm gonna be the power behind the president - and you'll be the power behind me!

Rent it. It's great.

Schulberg was reportedly writing another boxing screenplay as recently as 2006. Tantalizingly, it was the Joe Louis story, and he was writing it for Spike Lee. We have no idea what the status of the project is, but we would absolutely love to see it.

Budd Schulberg, Screenwriter, Dies at 95 [NYT]
Budd Schulberg, Boss of the Brando Waterfront [TIME]

Her striking frame, raspy voice, and taste for one-liners made her a natural subject for female impersonators. Told of her drag following, Arthur said, "I'm flattered." Her roles as Yente in Fiddler on the Roof, the outspoken Maude Finley of All in the Family and Maude, and most famously, the caustic Dorothy Zbornak of Golden Girls, gained her an avid gay audience. No funeral is planned. In wigs and wisecracks, she will live forever.

Of the four Golden Girls, Arthur is survived by Betty White and Rue McClanahan. None of the three attended costar Estelle Getty's funeral last year. White told Entertainment Tonight:

I knew it would hurt, I just didn't know it would hurt this much.. I'm so happy that she received her Lifetime Achievement Award while she was still with us, so she could appreciate that. She was such a big part of my life.

Update: The cult of Saint Beatrice has begun. Gays are posting this blasphemous Virgin Dorothy mashup in her holy memory:

(Photo by AP/Wally Fong)

Born in Amarillo, TX, the classically trained ballerina truly seemed to value her dancing more than her fame. She was part of a pre cokepants era when stars seemed glamorous and untouchable. It's difficult to imagine Charisse getting anyone kicked off a magazine cover or complaining about the size of her trailer. So let's remember her as she would have wanted — with footage of her dancing alongside Gene Kelly.

• Actress-dancer Cyd Charisse dies in L.A. at 86 [AP]

So. We all know the basics of the story. Big fun guy from Buffalo, worked in the New York Democratic party machine for Mario Cuomo and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Made the switch to journalism, got hired by NBC in Washington, and ended up the bureau chief four short years later, in 1988.

In 1991, he took over Meet the Press and quickly became one of the most important names in DC journalism. His journalistic style was a civil, well-read version of the GOTCHA that would take control of cable.

“Lawrence Spivak, who founded ‘Meet the Press,’ told me before he died that the job of the host is to learn as much as you can about your guest’s positions and take the other side,” he said in a 2007 interview with Time magazine. “And to do that in a persistent and civil way. And that’s what I try to do every Sunday.”

This could be an irritating style. Russert's specialty was pointing out a contradiction in a politician's vast record of spoken positions. Oftentimes this meant a descent into entirely useless minutiae. Though almost as often it was enlightening, or at least entertaining. It's certainly preferable to the Chris Matthews method of shouting whatever comes to mind, no matter how crazy. And Russert always knew his shit, even when you were fairly certain he was missing the point.

From Meet the Press he dictated the conventional wisdom of Washington's political establishment—a harder trick to pull off in the days before Drudge, The Note, the internet, Politico, and the rise of what is essentially meta-journalism disguised as political analysis. Russert just selected some insiders—usually white, usually male, every week well into the 2000s (such is DC!)—and allowed them to spin their little hearts out. It's still engaging television, even when it makes you want to level Washington and maybe give Philly a second chance as Capital.

But it was as the country's wonky guide to electoral politics that he perhaps undid some of the damage of the institution of the Sunday chatfest. Because Russert and his whiteboard did an admirable, commendable job, every four years, of explaining our insane and anti-democratic political process to a nation that has always been unclear on the subject. The electoral college, slightly demystified, for one night. Civics lessons are rare on television, and effective ones should be applauded.

And yes, it's actually shocking, and sad, to think that this November all we'll have is John King and his Blade Russert touch screen wall, or Keith Olbermann and his pseudo-gravitas, or poor bored Katie Couric to guide us through that stressful Tuesday night nationwide farce.

Russert died at work, as we said, at NBC's Washington studios. He is survived by his wife, Maureen Orth, his son Luke, and, tragically, his father, the hero of Tim's happily non-self-aggrandizing 2004 memoir, Big Russ and Me.

(Attached: a video montage of some of Tim's notable television moments.)

NBC'S Tim Russert Dead at 58 [MSNBC]

Ledger was born in Australia, achieved some degree of teenaged fame on Australian TV, and decamped for America where he quickly became a likable heartthrob in movies destined to be camp favorites (10 Things I Hate About You and A Knight's Tale probably share nothing in common but stars and fates as nostalgia fodder). His turn as Mel Gibson's son in The Patriot earned him a GQ cover. Then he got serious.

He became both a gay icon and an acclaimed thespian with his role as Ennis del Mar in Brokeback Mountain—and in addition to the Academy Award nomination, people were suddenly bestowing upon him the dangerous mantle of "young Brando."

And while he attacked his share of paparazzi, as all young guns must, Ledger became a New York icon not through phone-throwing and cop-slugging but through embodying a certain mid-2000s trend of quiet Brooklyn cohabitation.

In Brooklyn, with fiancee Michelle Williams, Heath Ledger became a Hollywood actor that the more sensitive among us could love, or at least tolerate. Why? Well, he lived in Brooklyn, wasn't afraid to kiss a dude in Brokeback Mountain, and showed us all that achieving (temporary, at least) domestic happiness was indeed possible. He and Williams went to community meetings to protest the Atlantic Yards development, hung out in the same places the rest of the parents in their neighborhood, took their kid to Prospect Park, and just generally behaved like normal people.

But the relationship ended. Ledger moved into Manhattan and began partying and making the columns in the proper young movie star fashion.

In a November piece in the New York Times (tracked down by commenter TedSez), Ledger, in the midst of playing a criminal psychopath in a perhaps unhealthily Method fashion, admitted to being distressed. He popped Ambien.

And then, some months later, he died, surrounded by pills, in an apartment belonging, according to early reports, to an Olsen twin.

He leaves behind a surprisingly short and almost as surprisingly consistent filmography. And he's survived by a two-year-old daughter, Matilda Rose.