Instead, capitalising on his popularity with the young, Columbia, who had acquired his contract, starred him in several popular but routine swashbucklers including Rogues of Sherwood Forest (1950, as the son of Robin Hood), Mask of the Avenger (1950), Prince of Pirates (1952) and The Adventures of Hajji Baba (1954).David Miller’s Saturday’s Hero (1951) was a good expose of colleagues who promote sport over study, with Derek in fine form as a student who discovers his esteem vanishes when an injury curtails his prowess on the football field. Produced by Humphrey Bogart’s Santana company, it starred Bogart as a lawyer who defends a boy on a murder charge, and though unsuccessful (Derek is sentenced to death), makes a strong plea for the erosion of the social injustices which cause such delinquency.As a hardened youth, whose dictum is to “live fast, die young and make a good-looking corpse”, Derek made a favourable impression and was immediately cast in Robert Rossen’s All The King’s Men (1949) as the disillusioned adopted son of an initially honest politician corrupted by power. WITH HIS dark, wavy hair and clean-cut handsomeness, John Derek became a favourite film star of teenagers in the early Fifties, but never fulfilled the promise as an actor that his early performances in such films as Knock on Any Door and All the King’s Men suggested. He eventually concentrated on photography and film production, and became best known as the husband and Svengali-like manager of Bo Derek. Born Derek Harris in Hollywood in 1926, he had a film-oriented background, his father being the silent film-maker Lawrence Harris and his mother a minor film actress, Dolores Johnson. The producer David Selznick put him under contract as a teenager, and gave him small roles (billed as Derek Harris) in the Selznick productions Since You Went Away (1944, as a boyfriend of Shirley Temple) and I’ll Be Seeing You (1945, as a sailor).
After war service, he was cast in the important role of a young man prompted by social conditions to turn to a life of violent crime in Nicholas Ray’s Knock on Any Door (1949). When the Stoneman family arrived, Miami was a frontier city of 5,000 inhabitants, and most of Florida a humid, disease-ridden emptiness.
She died with her life’s work incomplete, but closer perhaps to success than at any time in half a century.Marjory Stoneman, environmentalist and author: born Minneapolis 7 April 1890; married 1914 Kenneth Douglas (marriage dissolved 1917); died Miami 14 May 1998.. Four million acres survive, but that is only a quarter of what there once was. The park’s mangrove forests are the largest in the western hemisphere.But despite being a World Heritage Site, the wetlands are shrinking by the day. Today the state is the fourth most populous in the US.Today the Everglades, with its riot of flora and fauna including alligators, the Florida panther of which perhaps 30 remain, the extraordinary plant-eating sea mammal the manatee, as well as 400 species of birds and 1000 species of flowering plants, still awe the visitor. She eschewed such trappings of modern life as the telephone and the car. Her white gloves and floppy hat made her instantly recognisable.But even her valiant efforts could not stop the slow degradation of the Everglades, threatened by the damming and diversion of the rivers which fed it, by pollution and urban sprawl, and by the “reclamation” of huge tracts of wetland for citrus orchards and sugar cane.No ecosystem, least of all one as complex and delicate as the Everglades, could withstand the explosive growth of 20th-century Florida.
Later she extended it into a cottage, and lived there until the day she died.Marjory Stoneman Douglas was small in stature but boundless in energy. Her eccentric ways did nothing to detract from her celebrity. The acclaim at the time was instant: the New York Herald Tribune called it “a fabulous book of a fabulous Florida” .It was written in longhand, in the study she had built in 1928 across the street from where her father lived in the Miami district of Coconut Grove. The book is a wonderful mixture of guide, history and scientific treatise which became a bestseller, based on four years of research and countless trips of exploration across the wilderness of marsh and sawgrass, To this day it is regarded as the most authoritative work on the subject. In terms of what classifies a hit for Channel 4, around 3 to 3.5 million viewers, I think it’ll be a hit.”Comparable TV series are rare in the UK, says Lewis, because broadcasters here don’t commission shows for a niche audience.
“Over the last four or five years television has been driven by a combination of Channel 4 and Sky, where there’s an awful lot of programming targeted at 16-to-34-year-old men. It’s Lads’ TV; there’s even a whole channel of Granada Men and Motors.”Lewis adds that, traditionally, programming aimed at women hasn’t tried to break down its appeal in terms of lifestyle, or indeed anything else. He has high hopes for Ally McBeal when it launches on Channel 4 next week: “The longer the series ran in the States, the more male the audience became; although it was a hit with the audience it was written for straightaway, the quality of the programme pulled in different viewers … The shows that pull that same demographic in the UK are in short supply. Ian Lewis, broadcast director at Zenith Media, says it is particularly important to attract a young female audience because they have a large discretionary disposable income, and the lads are so well catered for. Called Felicity, it is described in true LA pitch-speak as “Ally McBeal in college”.Yet UK television hasn’t quite caught up yet. While the big US networks are reputedly frantic to find their own Ally McBeal, Fox, broadcaster of the series, has commissioned what it hopes will be a second.
In the US there is even an all-female rock festival planned by the organisers of Lollapalooza.Television producers in the UK tend to follow their US counterparts much as the buying public looks to the US trends. Meet Frank, Daniel and Lawrence and The Object of my Affection show every sign of doing the same. Lest we get carried away, though, these are a specific kind of chick flick; there is yet to be a female serial killer writ large.In the music industry, too, we must blame the strength of the female CD-buyer for the “girl with a guitar” phenomenon and the likes of Celine Dion, Alanis Morissette, Sheryl Crowe, Meredith Brooks etc. The recent girl films My Best Friend’s Wedding, How to Make an American Quilt and Waiting to Exhale were all solid performers at the box office and this year’s crop, Sliding Doors, Martha … Proprietor Rupert Murdoch is more powerful than ever, and even MacKenzie’s less senior colleagues now hold important jobs, notably David Montgomery and Piers Morgan at Mirror Group. The publishing phenomenon that sprang up around Bridget – the chronicles of single thirtysomethings, courtesy of Marion Keyes, Arabella Weir et al, presumably will also soon graduate to the screen.Hollywood, too, has recognised the power of the female pound and reacted, predictably, in the romantic comedy genre; there is even a name for the ilk – the chick flick.
