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Some great TV shows become great not because every single moving part fits together seamlessly, but because they're adept at narrowly avoiding utter disaster. A prime example of this is Garry Marshall's "Happy Days," the seminal 1970s sitcom that featured everyone from future "The Karate Kid" great Pat Morita to future master director and "Arrested Development" narrator Ron Howard. The show had to dodge a terrible original title and make changes that saved it from early cancellation before it even had a chance to fully establish itself -- and as we'll soon discuss, these weren't the only issues that could have felled "Happy Days" early on.

While "Happy Days" was technically about a group of 1950s teenagers transitioning into adulthood and their families, Henry Winkler's uber-cool greaser Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli soon all but hijacked the show, becoming a clear breakout character. Similarly, though the series was well-cast throughout,...

Happy Daysbrought us joy, happiness, and some of our favorite stars. One of those stars is Henry Winkler. The actor played Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli, aka The Fonz or Fonzie, on the series. And while he is close friends with his co-star Ron Howard and became a legend due to the series, the role almost went to someone else. Micky Dolenz from The Monkees recently spoke with People and said that he was originally up for the role of The Fonz prior to Winkler taking on the character.

It wasn't rare back then for rock stars to play roles on sitcoms. Dolenz and his fellow bandmates had been on The Brady Bunch, especially since Marcia Brady had a crush on the lead singer, Davy Jones. The band also ended up being in The Brady Bunch Movie because of how they'd pop up on the series. But Dolenz came from an acting...

He was in one of the biggest groups in the world – all without playing a note. As the last surviving Monkee turns 80, he remembers 60s fame – and what happened when the band broke free

In 1965, Micky Dolenz was an architecture student and jobbing actor in Los Angeles, doing the rounds of auditions for TV pilots. As a 10-year-old he had played the lead in a TV series called Circus Boy, but the former child star began to notice something odd about the jobs his agent was now sending him to: every one was for a series “about kids in a band”. He says: “One was called The Happeners, about a little folk trio like Peter, Paul and Mary. One was about a surfing band like the Beach Boys. Another was about a big family folk ensemble. Something was in the air, obviously, because of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Four Seasons,...

The Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival was awarded to Norway’s Dag Johan Haugerud for Dreams (Sex Love) tonight (February 22), the first time this honour has gone to the country.

Scroll down for full list of winners

Dreams (Sex Love) sees Haugerud complete his Sex Love Dreams trilogy with the story of a young woman whose writings about a crush on her French teacher shock her mother and grandmother, causing them to re-examine their own fantasies. M-Appeal is handling sales.

Haugerud said on stage that it was “beyond [his] wildest dreams” to win the Golden Bear and, speaking...

The 2025 Berlin International Film Festival has announced the winners of its Generation Kplus section, the festival’s sidebar dedicated to children’s cinema, with top honors going to The Botanist by Jing Yi and Michel Gondry’s animated feature Maya, Give Me a Title.

Jing Yi’s debut feature The Botanist (Zhi Wu Xue Jia) took home the Grand Prix of the international jury for best film. Set in a remote valley in China’s Xinjiang province, the film follows a young boy named Arsin, who lives with his grandmother and spends his days collecting plant specimens while navigating the slow yet inevitable changes within his secluded community. Featuring a dreamlike atmosphere and striking natural imagery, The Botanist stood out for its immersive portrayal of a world untouched by modernity.

The international jury also gave a special mention to Japanese director Satoko Yokohama’s Umibe é Iku Michi (Seaside Serendipity...

Berlin-based world sales company Pluto Film, led by Daniela and Benjamin Cölle, is marking its 10th anniversary with a shift into production as it readies its European Film Market slate.

Pluto’s Berlin Film Festival lineup is led by Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay’s psychological thriller “Hysteria,” which screens in the Panorama sidebar. The trailer debuts below.

When a burned Quran is found on a film set, the shoot takes a dark turn and the crew is thrown into turmoil. Caught in the crossfire of accusations, 24-year-old intern Elif is drawn into a dangerous game of secrets and lies, finding herself at the heart of an all-absorbing conspiracy. The film takes a look at how Western societies view their Muslim citizens, Daniela Cölle says.

Also on the Berlin slate is the heartwarming children’s docu-roadmovie “Circusboy,” directed by Anna Koch and Julia Lemke, set to debut in the Generation section.

The film focuses on 11-year-old Santino,...

Berlin-based Pluto Film has acquired Anna Koch and Julia Lemke’s documentary Circusboy (Zirkuskind) which will have its world premiere in the Generation Kplus line-up at next month’s Berlinale.

Circusboy follows the story of an 11-year-old boy growing up in a circus environment who loves to spend time with his 80-year-old great-grandfather.

The production, which is the directors’ second collaboration with Berlin-based Flare Film after their 2020 debut Glitter & Dust, is the first documentary to be made as part of “The Special Children’s Film” initiative supported by German public broadcasters, film funders and trade associations.

Pluto Film has put...

The Berlin International Film Festival has announced the full lineup for its 2025 Generation section, which highlights children and youth films.

The Generation 14plus 2025 competition will open with Christy, directed by Brendan Canty. The film portrays a teenage boy from Cork, Ireland, navigating the shadows of his family’s past while seeking a place in the world. In the Generation Kplus section, the opening film The Nature of Invisible Things explores a community’s support for two girls as they grapple with moments of farewell and new beginnings.

The competition lineup features Seaside Serendipity by Satoko Yokohama, an episodic film set on a nameless Japanese island, which blends magical realism with everyday life, questioning the intersection of art and life. Also highlighted is Wrong Husband by Zacharias Kunuk, which transports viewers to a mystical world in the Canadian Arctic, where human and spirit realms collide in a fairy tale about young love.

For my money, the Monkees are way, way more interesting than the Beatles. 

According to Andrew Sandoval's thorough and invaluable book "The Monkees: The Day-By-Day Story of the '60s TV Pop Sensation," an ad was put in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter on September 8, 1965, looking for "four insane boys" to be the members of a new pre-fabricated pop band. The band would also star in a TV series -- deliberately meant to evoke Richard Lester's 1964 Beatles film "A Hard Day's Night" -- that would use their real names, but present their lives as a fictional merry-go-round of kooky shenanigans. 

The producers zeroed in on former child actor Micky Dolenz, a friend of musician Stephen Stills named Peter Tork, a British, boyish heartthrob named Davy Jones, and heir to the Liquid Paper fortune, Mike Nesmith. Their TV series debuted on September 12, 1966, the week after "Star Trek" debuted, and...

When looking back at his days as a member of the TV show The Monkees, Micky Dolenz has no illusions about what he had gotten himself involved with. The media and everybody out there may have claimed that the show was created in direct response to The Beatles, and the creation of the band within it to more or less cash in on their success, but he doesn’t agree. In this exclusive interview, Micky explains, “I was happy being cast into a show. Not the member of a band, but the member of a cast in a television show about a band. That’s a fine distinction, but an important one. I was playing the role of the wacky drummer, and part of that job was they’d say, ‘Okay, on Tuesday night you’re going to record a lead vocal for a couple of songs,’ or sometimes two...

When was the last time you thought about The Iron Horse? Or The Time Tunnel? How about The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.? All are television shows that premiered the second week of September in 1966, and all have effectively faded from memory. Not so with The Monkees, the groundbreaking TV-music-performance project that ran amok across the late '60s pop cultural landscape like Frankenstein's multimedia monster. 50 years later, it's still very much alive.

Earlier this year, the three surviving Monkees reunited in the studio with producer Adam Schlesinger – a veteran of the uber-poppy Fountains of Wayne and the tunesmith behind the brilliant...

When was the last time you thought about The Iron Horse? Or The Time Tunnel? How about The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.? All are television shows that premiered the second week of September in 1966, and all have effectively faded from memory. Not so with The Monkees, the groundbreaking TV-music-performance project that ran amok across the late '60s pop cultural landscape like Frankenstein's multimedia monster. 50 years later, it's still very much alive. Earlier this year, the three surviving Monkees reunited in the studio with producer Adam Schlesinger - a veteran of the uber-poppy Fountains of Wayne and the tunesmith behind the...

Micky Dolenz has said that Davy Jones was like a brother to him. The Monkees drummer paid tribute to his former bandmate on Piers Morgan Tonight, saying that he had hoped news of Jones's death yesterday at the age of 66 was a hoax. > The Monkees' greatest songs: Video "David and I sort of hit it off pretty early and quickly because we both had histories in showbiz," Dolenz said. "I had a series when I was a kid called Circus Boy, and he'd been on Broadway doing Oliver, so we sort of had a lot in common. Over the years, y'know, our families and he and I... we bonded. I mean, after 47 years working with people like that... he was like my brother, we were like siblings." (more)...