Jesse Singer articles

What do you know about the old west? Well, if you ask most people they'd probably tell you that what they know they learnt from the movies. From The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to The Magnificent Seven to Unforgiven and Dances With Wolves—For over 80 years Hollywood has been presenting us with a version of the old west in the movies that we've basically accepted as fact. But the truth is just a little different.

For more than twenty years, Banksy has been the most famous anonymous artist on Earth. His murals appear overnight, spark headlines around the world, and sometimes sell for millions. But the one thing no one could ever definitively answer was simple: who actually created them?

If you watched movies or TV in the 70s, some actors felt unavoidable. Their faces were on movie posters, TV Guide covers, talk shows—and your living room television every weekend. Then the 80s arrived, Hollywood changed, and some of the decade’s biggest stars slowly (and not so slowly) drifted out of the spotlight. How many do you still remember?

Stairway to Heaven. Hotel California. Imagine…Yeah, we all know the 70s produced some of the best—and most talked about—songs in music history. But what about those incredible tracks that slipped through the cracks.

In the early 90s, Lark Voorhies was everywhere thanks to her role as Lisa Turtle on Saved by the Bell. But by the 2000s she had largely vanished from Hollywood. For years, fans wondered what had happened—and the truth behind her disappearance was far more complicated than anyone realized.

In the early 1930s, Peg Entwistle looked like she might actually achieve the Hollywood dream. She had Broadway success, a studio contract, and her first Hollywood film had just been released. But just a few months later she would leave the house to go for a walk into the hills above Hollywood. She never came back.

For a while in the 80s, Jan-Michael Vincent seemed untouchable. But away from the cameras, a very different story was already unfolding—one that would soon turn his life into one of Hollywood’s most turbulent cautionary tales.

If you watched Saved by the Bell in the late 80s and early 90s, Elizabeth Berkley was impossible to forget. From the curly hair to the unforgettable caffeine-pill meltdown, her intense and ambitious Jessie Spano became one of the defining faces of Saturday morning TV. But that was more than 30 years ago—and seeing Berkley today is a reminder that time really does fly.

There are plenty of modern bands that sound close enough to the old-school greats that fans will feel right at home. So we paired the boomer bands you grew up with with their modern-day doppelgängers you should check out. Do you agree with our choices?