RIP Ted Turner

 

Legendary businessman, TV producer, media proprietor and philanthropist Ted Turner died at his Tallahassee, Florida home from f Lewy body dementia on May 6. He was 87. Born Robert Edward Turner III in Cincinnati, Ohio on November 19, 1938. He founded (CNN) Cable News Network, the first 24-hour cable news channel. He also owned (TVM) Turner Classic Movies In addition, he founded WTBS, which pioneered the superstation concept in cable television, as well as television network TNT. Ted’s networks were where many of us saw for the first time some of the Spaghetti westerns not shown on the other networks or local stations. TNT also produced the TV Spaghetti western films “Dead for a Dollar” 1998 and “Outlaw Justice” 1999 directed by Gene Quintano and filmed in Spain on several of the old Spaghetti westerns sites.

Little Known Spaghetti Western Actors ~ Vladimir Di Lorenco

[These daily posts will cover little known actors or people that have appeared in more recent films and TV series. Various degrees of information that I was able to find will be given and anything that you can add would be appreciated.]

Vladimir Di Lorenco is/was a Yugoslavian stuntman and actor who appeared in several films during the 1960’s filmed in Croatia. He became well known as the Mexican who fought with Old Shatterhand in the stable in the movie “Desperado Trail”. He also starred in the other two parts of the Winnetou trilogy and in the film “Frontier Hellcat”.

Other than his filmography I can find no biographical information about him.

“Winnetou I Teil” (Apache Gold) as a Mexican in 1963, “Winnetou – 2. Teil” (Last of the Renegades) and “Unter geiern” (Frontier Hellcat) performing stunts both in 1964 and “Winnetou III Teil” (Desperado Train) performing stunts in 1965.

Di LORENCO, Vladimir (aka Vladimir Delorenc) [Yugoslavian] – stuntman, film actor.

Apache Gold – 1963 (Mexican)

Last of the Renegades – 1964 [stunts]

Frontier Hellcat – 1964 [stunts]

Desperado Trail – 1965 [stunts]

Spaghetti Western Directors, Screenwriters, Cinematographers

Spaghetti Western Director ~ Guillermo de Oliveira

Guillermo de Oliveira is a Spanish filmmaker, director, and screenwriter known for his documentary “Sad Hill Unearthed” and his short films adapting video games into live-action narratives. Born in Vigo, Galicia on December 6, 1986, he trained in New York and at Cuba's International Film and Television School in San Antonio de los Baños, establishing himself initially through advertising work while developing a distinctive voice in independent cinema. His early career featured shorts such as “Max Payne: Valhalla” (2012), “Modern Warfare: Sunrise” (2013), and ‘Red Dead Redemption: Seth's Gold’ (2015), which blended gaming culture with cinematic storytelling.

His feature directorial debut, the documentary “Sad Hill Unearthed” (2017), follows a group of enthusiasts restoring the legendary cemetery set from Sergio Leone's “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” in Spain, incorporating interviews with figures including Metallica's James Hetfield. The film received the Best Picture Award in the New Visions section at the Sitges Film Festival and a nomination for Best Documentary at the Goya Awards. De Oliveira later directed shorts including “Sauerdogs” (2022), starring August Diehl, and “Tegoyo” (2022), created under Werner Herzog's supervision, while serving as director of the Almería Western Film Festival from 2021 to 2023.

As of 2025, he is in production on his first fiction feature, the Galician-language true-crime thriller “A morte nos teus ollos”, inspired by a notorious 1994 murder case near his hometown, marking his transition to narrative filmmaking with support from Atresmedia Cine, Sideral, Sétima, and Buena Vista International.

Guillermo de Oliveira has directed three Euro-westerns: “Seth’s Gold” in 2015, “Sad Hill Unearthed” in 2016 and “Sauerdogs” in 2021

de OLIVEIRA, Guillermo (aka Lenny Gómez, Guillermo Fernández, Oliveira Guillermo Fernández de Oliveira) [12/6/1986, Vigo, Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain -     ] – producer, director, writer, cinematographer, founded Zarpruder Films [2013].

Seth’s Gold - 2015

Sad Hill Unearthed – 2016

Bury Me Not – 2020 [film was never made]

Sauerdogs – 2021

Spaghetti Western Screenwriters ~ Gian Paolo Callegari

Gian Paolo Callegari was an Italian polymath intellectual, renowned as a journalist, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and film director whose career spanned literature, theater, and cinema from the 1930s to the 1970s. Born in Bologna on March 7, 1909, and a law graduate, Callegari began as a journalist and war correspondent, contributing film criticism to publications like La Tribuna and supporting Fascist ideology through articles and novels in the 1930s, including the pro-colonial La croce del sud (1935) and the anti-Semitic Il cuore a destra (1939). His multifaceted output reflected a shift post-World War II, addressing social issues, crime, and historical themes while engaging with Italy's cultural reckoning.

In theater, Callegari's notable work includes the prize-winning play “Cristo ha ucciso” (1948), a provocative three-act drama premiered at the Venice Theatre Festival that reinterpreted the Passion of Christ to critique Christian anti-Semitism and link biblical deicide charges to the Holocaust, marking an early Italian literary response to the genocide despite his earlier ideological affiliations Other plays, such as “Ombre negli occhi” (1940) and “Le ragazze bruciate Verdi” (1956), explored psychological and social motifs. As a novelist and journalist, he wrote on topics from colonial adventures to post-war crime stories in magazines like Crimen, while maintaining interests in Italian rituals and Passion Plays.

Callegari's film career, ignited in 1939–1940, encompassed screenwriting, assistant directing, and directing over a dozen features, often in historical, adventure, and thriller genres during the 1950s and 1960s. Key directorial works include the adventure “I misteri della giungla nera” (1954, adapted from Emilio Salgari), and comedies like “Accadde di notte” (1961), alongside collaborations such as on the Resistance drama “Pian delle Stelle” (1946, directed by Giorgio Ferroni) and screenplays for aviation documentaries and peplum films such as “Gladiator of Rome” (1962). From 1961 to 1969, he extended his influence to Italian television, scripting originals including the thriller “Un errore giudiziario” (1963) and the spy story “Agente Sigma 3 – missione Goldwather” (1967). His legacy endures as a versatile figure bridging Italy's fascist past and post-war cultural revival.

Gian Paolo died in Grottaferrata, Lazio, Italy on October 19, 1982 at the age of 73.

Gian Paolo Callegari co-wrote the screenplay for one Spaghetti western, “Il fanciullo del West” (The Kid of the West) with Giorgio Ferroni, Vittorio Metz, Vincenzo Rovi in 1942.

CALLEGARI, Gian Paolo (aka G. P. Callegari, G.P. Callegari, Giampaolo Callegari, Gian-Paolo Callegari, Gianpaolo Callegari, Albert L. Whiteman) [3/7/1909, Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy – 10/19/1982, Grottaferrata, Lazio, Italy] – director, assistant director, writer.

The Kid of the West – 1942 (co)

Spaghetti Western Cinematographer ~ Ovidiu Gologan

Ovidiu Gologan was a Romanian cinematographer known for his contributions to mid-20th-century Romanian cinema and for capturing historic black-and-white footage of the 1946 execution of wartime leader Ion Antonescu. Born on May 14, 1912, in Constanța, he worked as a director of photography and camera operator on several films during Romania's communist period, including the internationally acclaimed “Forest of the Hanged” (1965), directed by Liviu Ciulei.

Gologan's career encompassed notable projects such as “Nepoții gornistului” (1953) and “Ciprian Porumbescu” (1973), where his cinematography supported the development of Romanian narrative filmmaking. His amateur recording of Antonescu's execution later gained renewed attention when incorporated into Radu Jude's short film “The Marshal's Two Executions” (2018), which juxtaposed the original silent footage with recreations from earlier biographical works.

Ovidiu died on April 26, 1982, in Bucharest a few weeks short of turning 70.

Ovidiu Gologan was the co-cinematographer on one Euro-western, “Moartea lui Joe Indianul” (Death of Injun Joe) with Robert Lefebvre in 1967.

GOLOGAN, Ovidiu [5/14/1912, Constanta, Romania – 4/26/1982, Bucharest, Romania] – cinematographer.

Death of Injun Joe – 1967 (co)

A new Swedish, British, Greek, Norwegian co-production “A Prayer for the Dying”

“A Prayer for the Dying” Review: Johnny Flynn and John C. Reilly Anchor an Impressively Severe End-of-Days Western

The frontier resilience of a small Wisconsin settler town is steadily overpowered by a deadly epidemic in Dara Van Dusen's tough, taut debut.

Variety

By Guy Lodge

February 13, 2026

The rolling grasslands of Slovakia stand in for the plains of 19th-century Wisconsin in “A Prayer for the Dying,” though the spiritual setting of Dara Van Dusen‘s unforgiving western lies in some remote outpost between anywhere and nowhere. As a small rural settlement is swiftly and ruthlessly stripped bare by the twin plagues of a diphtheria epidemic and spreading wildfires, the film eventually descends into a near-literal hellscape, though even when pandemonium takes over on screen, Van Dusen’s formal control never wavers. The starriest prospect in Berlin’s Perspectives competition for first features, it’s an imposing, ascetic debut, braced by performances of formidable grit and commitment from Johnny Flynn and John C. Reilly.

A native New Yorker now based in Norway, Van Dusen duly brings a blend of ruggedly American and Euro-arthouse sensibilities to a story with a burnt whiff of Cormac McCarthy to it — though it’s in fact adapted from a 1999 work of historical fiction by Stewart O’Nan that looks rather prescient from a 21st-century vantage point. It’s hard not to view this parable of a public health crisis exacerbated by misinformation and environmental disaster through a post-COVID lens. That lends contemporary urgency to a starkly authentic period piece, while also making it a potentially hard sell to audiences leery of end-of-days pandemic visions. Either way, it promises yet bigger things from its sternly focused writer-director.

It begins in an infernal blanket of orange haze, introducing grimy, wild-eyed Jacob Hansen (Flynn) as he points a rifle at the blurry, burning world around him — while the camera glides through the haze with the eerie, disembodied quality of a first-person shooter game. A title card specifies the year as 1870, a few years after the end of the Civil War, but can that be right? Everything on screen suggests the world has met its maker.

We rewind a short time. The skies clear, the land no longer ablaze but still a dry, flammable golden. Jacob, fresher-faced and better kempt, is an intrepid Norwegian settler and Civil War veteran in the new frontier town of Friendship, Wisconsin, where he lives with his wife Marta (Kristine Kujath Thorp) and their newborn daughter. Theirs is a community so small that Jacob does triple duty as its sheriff, preacher and undertaker, roles that circumstances will shortly consolidate in unhappy fashion. He’s spared the job of village doctor, at least: That goes to Guterson (Reilly), a kindly pragmatist equally unprepared for the gathering storm.

An agonized woman, writhing and coughing and gnarled by disease, is found in a field on the edge of town. Guterson diagnoses diphtheria, relentless and contagious, but tells only Jacob — together, they hope it’s an isolated case. But “A Prayer for the Dying” announces itself early, with its sparse, baleful atmospherics, as a tale where hope goes unrewarded. Though Marta, more pessimistic and proactive than her husband, asks that they leave straight away, Jacob feels a grim duty of care to the townspeople, even as he shields them from the direct truth of what they are facing. The disease spreads. The sky reddens. On the horizon appears a woolly shroud of smoke from a distant wildfire. It doesn’t stay distant for long.

Lean and terse and driven more by anxiety than incident, Van Dusen’s script doesn’t go in for surprises or conventionally developing tension, not least since the film’s prologue has already shown us where it’s all apocalyptically headed. But it’s a nervy, perceptive examination of the denial and fatalism toward which even community leaders can be inclined at moments of inescapable peril — an elemental, even Biblical, variation of the old horror-film trope that invites the audience’s queasy, helpless resistance to a character’s most patently self-destructive decisions.

In his punchiest big-screen showcase since 2017’s “Beast,” Flynn maps Jacob’s interior spiritual collapse with ever more agitated delivery and progressively winded body language, his stance shifting from that of a bluff, rugged protector and man of the people to darting, desperate survivalist. As the town’s man of science and reason, Reilly — an actor who, following last year’s “Heads or Tails?,” looks and sounds entirely at home in the realm of surreal period Americana — is a sturdily paternalistic presence until, suddenly and vulnerably, he isn’t anymore, and a soul-sinking derangement takes over.

But it’s the film’s below-the-line contributors who really tighten the screws, beginning with DP Kate McCullough. An ASC Spotlight nominee for her airy, radiant work on Irish Oscar nominee “The Quiet Girl,” she works here in a far more cramped, claustrophobic register, using Academy ratio, a deadwood palette gradually stripped of any verdant possibility, and an effective tendency toward jumpy whip-pans as the situation worsens.

Jan Kocman’s slow-pulsing score coordinates perfectly with Gustaf Berger and Jesper Miller’s sound design in its sparseness, the landscape seeming to creak and echo as it depopulates. Likewise, production designer Hubert Pouille’s boxy, timber-built structures aptly have a toy-town quality to them, as if they went up just yesterday, and can be destroyed just as fast by vengeful natural forces. In “A Prayer for the Dying,” man is mere kindling.

 A Prayer for the Dying – International title

 

A 2024 Swedish, British, Greek, Norwegian co-production [Film i Väst, Garagefilm

     International, Tom Wilhelmsens Stiftelse (Stockholm), Anton, The Bureau (London),

     Asterisk, Yafka Studio (Athens), Eye Eye Pictures, Oslo Pictures, Albert Verlinde

     Producties, Talent Norge (Oslo),

Producers: John Baker, Harald Fagerheim Bugge, Charles Dorfman, Jan Kallista, Tom

     Kjeseth, Ketil Lømsland, Marcin Luczaj, Jan Naszewski, Andrea Berentsen Ottmar,

     Sébastien Raybaud, Magnus Thomassen, Marlon Vogelgesang, Dyveke Bjørkly

     Graver, Pavel Bercík, Kristina Börjeson, Fenia Cossovitsa, Jana Garajova, Tristan

     Goligher, Vicky Miha, Mimmi Spång, Zahra Waldeck

Director: Dara Van Dusen

Story: A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O’Nan

Screenplay: Dara Van Dusen

Cinematographey: Kate McCullough [color]

Music: Beata Hlavenkova

Running time: 95 minutes

 

Cast:

Jacob Hansen – Johnny Flynn

Doc – John C. Reilly

Marta Hansen - Kristine Kujath Thorp

Harlow - Gustav Lindh

Chase - Hilton Pelser

Fenton - Andrew Whipp

Ol Meyer - Daniel Weyman

Bart - David Ganly

John Henry - Peter Adame

Sarah Ramsay - Radka Caldová

Marcus & Thaddeus - Tobias John Coulton-Shaw

Lydia - Dagmar Edwards

Train engineer – Eduard Horvath

Fred Lembeck - Juraj Hrcka

Cyril - Christopher John-Slater

Sylvester - Tadhg Murphy

Bitsi - Nienna Robinsonová

Emil - Christopher Rygh

Singing woman - Monika Stolcova

Amelia - Charlotte Vorobjov

Chase's woman/village girl – Vanessa Weisz

Millard - Leonard Winkler

Dead soldier - Viktor Zorňan

Stunt coordinator - Roman Jankovic

Stunts: Marián Chmelár, Martin Csiaki, Sona Havranova, Milan Hrvol, Denisa Juhos, Matus Lajcak, Stano Satko (Stanislav Satko), Miroslava Slezáková, Michal Vesely

Trailer link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj_kkJFm4AQ

Who Are Those Guys? ~ Henry Fonda

 

Henry Jaynes Fonda was an American actor whose career in theater and film extended over five decades, characterized by portrayals of resolute, morally grounded protagonists that resonated with audiences as embodiments of American integrity.

Born in Grand Island, Nebraska on May 16, 1905, Fonda rose to prominence in the late 1930s with stage successes like “Mister Roberts” and film roles including Tom Joad in John Ford's adaptation of “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940), for which he received an Academy Award nomination, establishing him as a leading man adept at depicting ordinary individuals confronting adversity. His versatility shone in diverse genres, from the courtroom tension of “12 Angry Men” (1957), which he co-produced and starred in as the lone dissenting juror championing reason over prejudice, to Westerns like “My Darling Clementine” (1946) as Wyatt Earp, and war dramas such as “The Longest Day” (1962).

In 1942, at age 37, Fonda enlisted in the United States Navy, serving as a lieutenant aboard the light cruiser USS San Diego in the Pacific Theater, participating in operations supporting invasions at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, for which he earned the Bronze Star Medal for valor in combat-related duties. Postwar, he resumed acting, culminating in his sole Academy Award for Best Actor as the irascible yet vulnerable Norman Thayer in “On Golden Pond” (1981), co-starring with Katharine Hepburn and his daughter Jane Fonda, marking a poignant late-career triumph after decades of critical acclaim without prior Oscar recognition

In 1968, Fonda portrayed the ruthless outlaw Frank in Sergio Leone's “Once Upon a Time in the West”, marking a significant departure from his established heroic persona and earning acclaim for subverting audience expectations of his screen image. Initially reluctant, Fonda accepted the antagonist role after persuasion, delivering a chilling performance as the film's primary villain opposite Charles Bronson and Claudia Cardinale.[69] The film grossed approximately $5.3 million domestically, achieving modest initial box-office returns but later gaining cult status for its revisionist Western style. Fonda followed up his appearance as Frank with another Spaghetti western “My Name is Nobody” as gunfighter Jack Beauregard trying to escape his past. He’s assisted by a young gunman named Nobody played by Terence Hill.

FONDA, Henry (aka Hank Fonda) (Henry Jaynes Fonda) [5/16/1905, Grand Island, Nebraska, U.S.A. – 8/12/1982, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. (cardiorespiratory arrest)] – producer, film, TV actor, singer, married to actress, singer Margaret Sullavan (Margaret Brooke Sullavan) [1909-1960] (1931-1933), married to Frances Seymour Brokaw [1908-1950] (1936-1950) father of producer, producer, writer, actress, singer Jane Fonda (Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda) [1937-    ], producer, director, writer, actor, singer Peter Fonda (Peter Henry Fonda) [1940-2019], married to producer, actress Susan Blanchard (Susan Blanchard Jacobson) [1928-    ] (1950-1956) father of Amy Fisher Fonda [1953-    ], married to actress Leonarda Franchetti [1931-2025] (1957-1961), married to flight attendant Shirlee Mae Adams [1932-    ] (1965-1982).

Once Upon a Time in the West – 1968 (Frank)

My Name is Nobody – 1972 (Jack Beauregard)

White Fang – 1972 [film was never made]

The Josh Clayton Story – 1973 [film was never made]

Arrivano i vostro – 1983 [archive footage]

Sergio Leone, the Westerns (TV) – 1997 [archive footage]

The 6th a Quemarropa (TV) – 2022 [archive footage]

Special Birthdays

Günter Clemens (actor) would have been 85 today but died in 2016.

Mike H. McGaughy (actor) would have been 75 but died in 2007.

Cinco de Mayo 2026