There haven’t been any new updates from me in awhile because I’ve been quite busy enjoying the long Canada Day weekend. However, one person who probably didn’t enjoy this past weekend was Steven Spielberg, as his latest film, The BFG, was an uncharacteristic flop from him. Well, here’s what you could probably call Spielberg’s first true success. At age 13, he directed a 40-minute 8mm war film called Escape to Nowhere, starring many of his school friends and his sister, Anne Spielberg, who played a woman who disguises herself as a man to fight in World War I. It won Spielberg his first filmmaking prize and while only two minutes of footage of Escape to Nowhere still exist, it’s put together pretty damn impressively for a 13-year old.

I’ve done a lot of “Before They Were Stars” features on World Wrestling Entertainment superstars, but the official WWE Youtube channel recently released their own compilation of “Before They Were Stars” clips. Some of these clips have been featured on The Back Row before, but others came as a complete surprise to me.

Here’s a Pampers commercial from the early 1970s featuring a young Susan Sarandon, who pretty much looks exactly the same 40+ years later.  In this ad, a pair of women with babies are lucky enough to visit a shoe salesman who strangely has a convenient box of diapers just laying around his store.

One week ago today, Dean Ambrose reached the top of the pro wrestling world and became the World Wrestling Entertainment World Heavyweight Champion. Quite an achievement for a guy who used to wrestle matches in which his forehead was sliced open by a Sawzall. Anyway, in 2008, Ambrose was still wresting under his former name, Jon Moxley, and got a tryout with WWE’s rival promotion, Total NonStop Action Wrestling, a.k.a. TNA. This is footage of him wrestling an untelevised “dark match” before one of TNA’s events against an opponent named Lamar Braxton Porter. In all their infinite wisdom, TNA decided not to offer Moxley/Ambrose a contract and he went on to much bigger things.

Later today, our newest episode of Shouts from the Back Row will be posted and we will be discussing the all-too-brief career of the late Anton Yelchin, who died tragically in a freak accident last weekend. Looking back at his filmography, I was surprised to see that he had an early role in Along Came a Spider, the 2001 thriller starring Morgan Freeman as Alex Cross. I saw the movie when it originally came out, but don’t remember much about it, but the 11-year old Yelchin played the son of the Russian President, who is nearly kidnapped by Michael Wincott’s villain in this scene.

Yes, that’s the same Dee Snider of Twisted Sister fame! Before Rob Zombie became the world’s most successful heavy metal star-turned-horror director, Dee Snider tried his hand at writing, producing and starring in his own horror film, Strangeland. Snider played the psychotic Captain Howdy, who abducts young girls and performs “body art” torture on them. A young Linda Cardellini had one of her earliest roles as the teenage heroine in Strangeland and in the following clip, she is abducted, kept naked in a cage, and has her mouth stitched shut.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXWkwdue9VM

The Outside Man is an offbeat 1972 French-made film which happens to be set in Los Angeles and stars noted French actor as Jean-Louis Trintignant as a hitman. At one point in the story, his character takes a mother and her young son hostage. The kid just happens to be played by 11-year old Jackie Earle Haley in his film debut and in this clip, the hitman slaps him silly for eavesdropping. According to Haley, during the filming of the scene, Trintignant just decided to slap the shit out of him for real.

A true test for an aspiring stand-up comedian is how well they handle hecklers at their performances. In 2009, an up-and-coming comedian named Amy Schumer headlined a show in Atlanta in which an obnoxious drunk woman in the audience was heckling the performers all night. So Schumer decided to fire back…

There have been a lot of shocking celebrity deaths in 2016, but perhaps none more tragic and unexpected than that of Anton Yelchin, whose promising career was cut short when he was killed in a car accident yesterday at age 27. Yelchin had been acting ever since he was a child and his official debut was in a 2000 episode of ER. In an eerie coincidence, he played the role of a kid who loses both of his parents in a car accident! R.I.P.

Remember the 1991 Christina Applegate comedy with one of the greatest titles ever for a PG-13 film: Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead? Well, I was surprised to discover that a pre-X-Files David Duchovny had a supporting role in the film. And, man, if Duchovny’s clothing and hairstyle don’t scream “early nineties”, I don’t know what does!