It was already April 4th over here in Australia when Jake had posted the Instagram and when I saw the BBC headline and April 4th is Heath Ledger's birthday.
I also saw that Mat Whitecross had posted the sad news that Bill Heine, the former owner of the Duke of York's cinema in Brighton and the Penultimate Cinema in Oxford, England, had passed away on April 2nd, 2019.
I wrote about writing to Mat Whitecross and Coldplay in this old post of mine - Riders on the Storm?
An American who studied law at Balliol College, he was running two Oxford cinemas at the time, but from 1988 he became better known as a Radio Oxford presenter.
When pressed by journalists to provide a rationale for the shark, he suggested the following: The shark was to express someone feeling totally impotent and ripping a hole in their roof out of a sense of impotence and anger and desperation…. It is saying something about CND, nuclear power, Chernobyl and Nagasaki. The headless sculpture, with the label “Untitled 1986” fixed to the gate to the house, was erected on the 41st anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
Created by the sculptor John Buckley, it is made of fibreglass, weighs four hundredweight, and is 25 feet long."
The first related to Headington Cinema(which used to stand on the opposite side of New High Street to the shark, where Standon Court is now).
The previous owner had named it the Moulin Rouge but failed to get planning permission to put up a turning windmill on the grounds that this was misleading, as there were no can-can dancers. Bill took over the cinema in 1980 and put up an enormous pair of can-can legs(sculpted, like the shark, by John Buckley).
When the planners predictably objected on the same grounds, serving enforcement order 82/00144/E, Bill promptly changed the name of the cinema to “Not the Moulin Rouge”, stating that a pair of can-can legs could not advertise anything which was patently not the Moulin Rouge, and he eventually got away with it. This cinema came under the aegis of Bill’s Penultimate Picture Company, which also ran the Penultimate Picture Palace(now renamed the Ultimate Picture Palace) in Jeune Street, Oxford and the Duke of York’s Cinema in Brighton.
When the [Not the] Moulin Rouge in Headington closed in 1991, the legs were transferred to his Brighton cinema.
In 1994 the Penultimate Picture Palace Company collapsed."
I noticed that Heathhas23acting credits athis IMDB page and ironically the first acting credit was for playing an orphan clown in a short film called 'Clowning Around':-)
Life and death certainly have a dark sense of humour it seems:-)
The Wisdom of Oz ... and Aphorisms?
Happy birthday Heath ... wherever you now are.
"The shark was the second headache that Bill gave the Oxford city planning department.
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