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 As I wish you all a safe and sane 4th of July, with the help of Joe E. Brown, I’d like to try to catch up with some news and notes.
First, I want to mark the passing of Samuel K. Rubin, who died on June 26 at the age of 90. Sam was a regular guy who did some remarkable things back when the world wasn’t quite so “connected.” He ran a furniture store in Indiana, Pennsylvania and loved silent movies, but felt a certain frustration because there weren’t many people in the community who shared his enthusiasm. So he started what we used to call a fanzine called The 8mm Collector, as a means of reaching out to fellow enthusiasts. It worked. Word-of-mouth, and some helpful publicity, built a following for his homegrown publication. I read about it in an issue of Forrest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland, and it changed my life. I was 13 years old and itching to write about my passion for movie history, so I submitted an article to Sam, without telling him my age. He accepted the article and published it; when I then told him how old I was he said he didn’t care. Can you imagine how that made me feel?
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THE STONING OF SORAYA M.
 Just because a story is true doesn’t mean it’s going to translate into an effective movie, but that fact makes all the difference in the case of The Stoning of Soraya M. The movie flirts with melodrama, perhaps too much for some people’s taste, but knowing that its foundation is a shocking real-life story keeps it from tipping overboard. That, and the committed performances by Shohreh Aghdashloo and a mostly Iranian-American cast, help create a riveting drama that addresses the shameful treatment of women that still pervades many cultures and religions. Yet Soraya M. isn’t a tract: it’s a story that French-Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam stumbled onto some years ago and eventually chronicled in an explosive book. Director Cyrus Nowrasteh and his wife Betsy Giffen Nowraseth have adapted it into a powerful screenplay, which leads up to the inevitable stoning—a sequence that’s almost unbearable to watch yet impossible to turn away from.
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 Summer is officially here, as opposed to the “summer movie season,” which begins some time in May. And from the time Mack Sennett reigned as the King of Comedy, producers and publicists have known that nothing guarantees newspaper and magazine coverage quite like pretty girls cavorting at the beach or indulging in other seasonal activities. I am honor bound to continue that great tradition, and it seems only fitting that we kick off our pictorial tribute with one of the Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties of the 1920s, the little-remembered Lois Boyd. Exactly why Ms. Boyd is buoyed by balloons I can’t say, but the result is just oddball enough to catch one’s eye. The canny Sennett caught on to the publicity value of staging such photos early in his career and even went so far as to put these bathing beauties (from Gloria Swanson to Carole Lombard) in his comedy shorts. To see more summery photos from the past, click HERE.
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