• The Screengrab Holiday Special, Part One: Live Blogging "The Ten Commandments"



    7:00 P.M., Saturday:
    : It's Easter Eve, which means it's time to kick things off with ABC's umpteenth broadcast of Cecil B. DeMille's career-capping whopper of a religious epic, The Ten Commandments (1956). Back when this was a good, God-fearing nation and it was easier to think of members of this movie's cast who were still alive, it was customary for ABC to run this movie on Sunday, as the cherry on top of the Easter festivities. But now it's been relegated to Saturday evenings, which nowadays are known as the night when the commercial networks don't even bother trying. Back in the days when ABC ran The Ten Commandments in prime time on the theory that someone would watch it, the network would have confronted the issue of the movie's exceptional length by spreading it out over two nights or letting it play past eleven o'clock, forcing local affiliates to try to keep their late-night news anchors up past their bedtimes. Now, eager to just get the august programming tradition the hell over with, ABC starts the movie an hour before prime time, daring moms across the land to call their kids in from soccer practice lest they miss Moses's thrilling origin story.

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  • Our Favorite Tony Curtis Story

    The Guardian profiles Tony Curtis, who would like you to know he’s still very much alive, and he’s still had more sex than you could even dream about. Now 82, Curtis enjoys his golden years from a gated community outside Las Vegas. “His house, situated on the corner of a quiet street, seems surprisingly small,” writes John Patterson. “Once you're inside, though, it opens up hugely, and the living-room window is a majestic Cinemascope production, looking on to a small pool that in turn overlooks a golf course that stretches away into the desert distance. It rises to a low ridge that niftily obscures all the crappier suburbs of Vegas, leaving visible only the thicket of garishly coloured casino-hotels downtown. At night, this must truly be a million-dollar view.”

    Curtis doesn’t get around as well as he used to, so his days of carousing the strip Rat Pack-style are probably behind him.

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