“Grease” movie soundtrack earns its second #1 hit
The 1960s was the final decade in which the musical hits of Broadway were routinely and successfully adapted by Hollywood into big-budget screen versions. West Side Story (1961), My Fair Lady (1964), The Sound Of Music (1965), Funny Girl (1968)—all of these movie musicals were among the biggest critical and commercial hits of their era. But while the early part of the subsequent decade brought successful adaptations of Fiddler on the Roof (1971) and Cabaret (1972), Hollywood had all but given up Broadway by the middle of the 1970s. And then, in 1978, Paramount Pictures placed a big bet on a small musical called Grease and came up with not just an enormous hit movie, but a true pop-cultural phenomenon that included one of the most successful original motion picture soundtrack albums in music history. On August 29, 1978, that album earned its second chart-topping hit when its third single—Frankie Valli’s “Grease”—reached the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100.
Ted Kennedy, “liberal lion of the Senate,” dies at 77 On August 25, 2009, Edward “Ted” Kennedy, the youngest brother of President John F. Kennedy and a U.S. senator from Massachusetts from 1962 to 2009, dies of brain cancer at age 77 at his home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Kennedy, one of the longest-serving senators in American history, was a leader of the Democratic Party and a spokesman for liberal […]
