Dennis William Quaid is an American actor. He is known for his starring roles in Breaking Away (1979), The Right Stuff (1983), The Big Easy (1986), Innerspace (1987), Great Balls of Fire! (1989), Dragonheart (1996), The Parent Trap (1998), Frequency (2000), The Rookie (2002), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), In Good Company (2004), Flight of the Phoenix (2004), Yours, Mine & Ours (2005), and Vantage Point (2008). Quaid received a Golden Globe Award nomination for his role in Far from Heaven (2002). In 2009, The Guardian named him one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination.
Stripes is a 1981 American action comedy film directed by Ivan Reitman and starring Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Warren Oates, P. J. Soles, Sean Young, and John Candy. Ramis wrote the film with Len Blum and Dan Goldberg, the latter of whom also served as producer alongside Reitman. It tells the story of an immature taxi cab driver and his teacher friend who enlist in the United States Army with comical results. Numerous actors, including John Larroquette, John Diehl, Conrad Dunn, Judge Reinhold, Joe Flaherty, Dave Thomas, Timothy Busfield, and Bill Paxton, appear in the film in some of the earliest roles of their careers. The film's score was composed by Elmer Bernstein.
Pamela Suzette Grier is an American actress and singer. Described by Quentin Tarantino as cinema's first female action star, she achieved fame for her starring roles in a string of 1970s action, blaxploitation and women in prison films for American International Pictures and New World Pictures. Her accolades include nominations for an Emmy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Satellite Award and a Saturn Award.
Warren Mercer Oates was an American actor best known for his performances in several films directed by Sam Peckinpah, including The Wild Bunch (1969) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974). Another of his most acclaimed performances was as officer Sam Wood in In the Heat of the Night (1967). Oates starred in numerous films during the early 1970s that have since achieved cult status, such as The Hired Hand (1971), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), and Race with the Devil (1975). Oates also portrayed John Dillinger in the biopic Dillinger (1973) and as the supporting character U.S. Army Sergeant Hulka in the military comedy Stripes (1981). Another notable appearance was in the classic New Zealand film Sleeping Dogs (1977), in which he played the commander of the American forces in the country.
The Toughman Contest, founded in 1979 in Bay City, Michigan, by late boxing promoter Art Dore (1936–2022), is a chance for the novice amateur boxers to test themselves in the ring.
Drum is a 1976 American drama film based on the 1962 Kyle Onstott novel of the same name. It was released by United Artists and is a sequel to the film Mandingo, released in 1975. The film stars Warren Oates, Pam Grier and Ken Norton, and was directed by Steve Carver.
Tough Enough may refer to:
The Big Easy is a 1986 American neo-noir romantic thriller film directed by Jim McBride and written by Daniel Petrie Jr. The film stars Dennis Quaid, Ellen Barkin, John Goodman, and Ned Beatty. The film was both set and shot on location in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Wyatt Earp is a 1994 American epic biographical Western drama film directed and produced by Lawrence Kasdan, and co-written by Kasdan and Dan Gordon. The film covers the lawman of the same name's life, from an Iowa farmboy, to a feared marshal, to the feud in Tombstone, Arizona that led to the O.K. Corral gunfight. Starring Kevin Costner in the title role, it features an ensemble supporting cast that includes Gene Hackman, Mark Harmon, Michael Madsen, Bill Pullman, Dennis Quaid, Isabella Rossellini, Tom Sizemore, JoBeth Williams, Mare Winningham and Jim Caviezel in one of his earliest roles.
Black Mama White Mama, also known as Women in Chains, Hot, Hard and Mean and Chained Women, is a 1973 women in prison film directed by Eddie Romero and starring Pam Grier and Margaret Markov. The film has elements of blaxploitation.
Under Fire is a 1983 American political thriller film set during the last days of the Nicaraguan Revolution that ended the Somoza regime in 1979. Directed by Roger Spottiswoode, it stars Nick Nolte, Gene Hackman and Joanna Cassidy. The musical score by Jerry Goldsmith, which featured jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Score. The editing by Mark Conte and John Bloom was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Editing. The film was shot in the Mexican states of Chiapas and Oaxaca.
Bill is a 1981 American made-for-television biographical drama film starring Mickey Rooney and Dennis Quaid based on the life of Bill Sackter. The film was broadcast on CBS on December 22, 1981. A sequel, Bill: On His Own, was released in 1983. Writer/filmmaker Barry Morrow, portrayed in the film by Dennis Quaid, based the story on his life experiences with Sackter, and later became his legal guardian. Sackter, who did not have autism, would also serve as a partial inspiration for the character of Raymond Babbitt in Morrow's early draft screenplay for the 1988 film Rain Man.
Syracuse, New York has been portrayed in a range of literary, film and other fictional works.
Angels' Wild Women is a 1972 biker film written and directed by cult director Al Adamson. Preceded by Satan's Sadists (1969) and Hell's Bloody Devils (1970), it is the last in a trio of (unrelated) motorcycle gang films directed by Adamson for Independent-International Pictures Corp., a company he co-founded with Sam Sherman. The plot centers on a group of tough biker babes who leave their cycle gang boyfriends to go on a violent rampage. When a cult leader kills one of the girls, the others go out for revenge.
Stan Shaw is an American actor. He began his career performing on Broadway musicals Hair and Via Galactica, before making his feature film debut appearing in Truck Turner (1974). Shaw later appeared in films such as The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976), Rocky (1976), The Boys in Company C (1978), The Great Santini (1979), Runaway (1984), The Monster Squad (1987), Harlem Nights (1989), Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), Rising Sun (1993), Cutthroat Island (1995), Daylight (1996) and Snake Eyes (1998).
The Big Doll House is a 1971 American women-in-prison film starring Pam Grier, Judy Brown, Roberta Collins, Brooke Mills, and Pat Woodell. The film follows six female inmates through daily life in a gritty, unidentified tropical prison. Later the same year, the film Women in Cages featured a similar story and setting and much the same cast, and was shot in the same abandoned prison buildings. A nonsequel follow-up, titled The Big Bird Cage, was released in 1972.
Blaxploitation is an ethnic subgenre of the exploitation film that emerged in the United States during the early 1970s, when the combined momentum of the civil rights movement, the black power movement, and the Black Panthers spurred African-American artists to reclaim the power of depiction of their ethnicity, and institutions like UCLA to provide financial assistance for African-American students to study filmmaking. This combined with Hollywood adopting a less restrictive rating system in 1968. The term, a portmanteau of the words "black" and "exploitation", was coined in August 1972 by Junius Griffin, the president of the Beverly Hills–Hollywood NAACP branch. He claimed the genre was "proliferating offenses" to the black community in its perpetuation of stereotypes often involved in crime. After the race films of the 1940s and 1960s, the genre emerged as one of the first in which black characters and communities were protagonists, rather than sidekicks, supportive characters, or victims of brutality. The genre's inception coincides with the rethinking of race relations in the 1970s.
Kid Blue is a 1973 American Comedy Western film directed by James Frawley and starring Dennis Hopper, Warren Oates, Lee Purcell, Peter Boyle and Ben Johnson.
A Decade Under the Influence is a 2003 American documentary film, directed by Ted Demme and Richard LaGravenese. It was produced by Independent Film Channel.
On the Edge is a 1986 American drama film directed by Rob Nilsson, and written by Nilsson and Roy Kissin. It stars Bruce Dern, Pam Grier, Bill Bailey, Jim Haynie, John Marley and Marty Liquori. The film was released on May 2, 1986, by Skouras Pictures.
