Morris may refer to:

People[link]

• Morris (surname), a common family name (and a list of people with the name)
• Morris (comics) (1923–2001), Belgian cartoonist, creator of Lucky Luke
• Morris, one of the 14 Tribes of Galway, Ireland

Places[link]

In Canada

• Morris, Manitoba

In the United States

• Morris, Alabama
• Morris, Connecticut
• Morris, Georgia
• Morris, Illinois
• Morris, Indiana
• Morris County, Kansas
• Morris, Minnesota
• Morris (town), New York
  • Morris (village), New York
• Morris, Oklahoma
• Morris, Wisconsin
• Morris County, New Jersey
• Morris Island, Charleston Harbor, South Carolina
• Morris Plains, New Jersey
• Morris Township, Pennsylvania (disambiguation)

Other uses[link]

• Morris Chair, an early type of reclining chair
• Morris College, a private liberal arts college in Sumter, South Carolina
• Morris Communications, an American publishing company
• Morris dance, a traditional English dance form
• Morris Motors, a former British car manufacturer
• Morris Multimedia, an American publishing company
• Morris the Cat, mascot of 9Lives brand cat food
• Morris the Midget Moose, a Walt Disney animated short
• Morris worm, one of the first computer worms distributed via the Internet
• Morris & Co., a company manufacturing items of decorative art
• Nine Men's Morris, a board game
• USCS Morris, a survey ship in service with the United States Coast Survey from 1849 to 1855
• USS Morris, the name of several ships of the Continental Navy and United States Navy

See also[link]

• All pages beginning with "Morris"
• Morriston
• Morristown (disambiguation)
• Morrisville (disambiguation)
• Mount Morris (disambiguation)
• Maurice (disambiguation)

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Errol Mark Morris (born February 5, 1948) is an American film director. In 2003, The Guardian put him seventh in its list of the world's 40 best directors.^[1] In 2003, his film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Biography[link]

Early life and education[link]

Morris was born in Hewlett, New York on February 5, 1948. When he was two years old, his father died of a heart attack. His mother, a Juilliard graduate, supported Morris and his brother as a music teacher. Morris attended Hewlett Elementary School in a class with Brent Glass, Tony Kornheiser and former Village Voice editor David Schneiderman.^{[citation needed]}

After being treated for strabismus in childhood, he refused to wear an eye patch. As a consequence, he has limited sight in one eye and lacks normal stereoscopic vision.^[2]

In the 10th grade, Morris attended the Putney School, a boarding school in Vermont. He began playing the cello, spending a summer in France studying music under the acclaimed Nadia Boulanger, who also taught Morris' future collaborator Philip Glass. Describing Morris as a teenager, Mark Singer wrote that he "read with a passion the forty-odd Oz books, watched a lot of television, and on a regular basis went with a doting but not quite right maiden aunt ("I guess you'd have to say that Aunt Roz was somewhat demented") to Saturday matinées, where he saw such films as This Island Earth and Creature from the Black Lagoon — horror movies that, viewed again 30 years later, still seem scary to him."^[3]

Morris attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, graduating in 1969 with a B.A. in history. For a brief time Morris held small jobs, first as a cable television salesman and then as a term-paper writer. His unorthodox approach to applying for grad school included "trying to get accepted at different graduate schools just by showing up on their doorstep." Having unsuccessfully approached both the University of Oxford and Harvard University, Morris was able to talk his way into Princeton University, where he began studying the history of science, a topic in which he had "absolutely no background." His concentration was in the history of physics, and he was bored and unsuccessful in the prerequisite physics classes he had to take. This, together with his antagonistic relationship with his advisor Thomas Kuhn ("'You won't even look through my telescope.' And his response was 'Errol, it's not a telescope, it's a kaleidoscope.'"^[3]) ensured that his stay at Princeton would be short. He left Princeton in 1972, enrolling at Berkeley as a Ph.D. student in philosophy. At Berkeley, Morris once again found that he was not well-suited to his subject. "Berkeley was just a world of pedants. It was truly shocking. I spent two or three years in the philosophy program. I have very bad feelings about it," he later said.^[3] He became a regular at the Pacific Film Archive, as Tom Luddy, the director of the archive at the time, later remembered: "He was a film noir nut. He claimed we weren't showing the real film noir. So I challenged him to write the program notes. Then, there was his habit of sneaking into the films and denying that he was sneaking in. I told him if he was sneaking in he should at least admit he was doing it."^[3]

Inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho, Morris visited Plainfield, Wisconsin in 1975. While in Wisconsin, he conducted multiple interviews with Ed Gein, the infamous serial killer who was a resident at Mendota State Hospital in Madison. He later made plans with German film director Werner Herzog, whom Tom Luddy had introduced to Morris, to return in the summer of 1975 to secretly open the grave of Gein's mother to test their theory that Gein himself had already dug her up. Herzog arrived on schedule, but Morris had second thoughts and was not there. Herzog did not open the grave. Morris later returned to Plainfield, this time staying for almost a year, conducting hundreds of hours of interviews. Although he had plans to either write a book or make a film (which he would call Digging up the Past), Morris never completed his Ed Gein project. In the fall of 1976, Herzog visited Plainfield again, this time to shoot part of his film Stroszek. After the shooting finished, Herzog handed Morris an envelope with cash in it. Morris walked over to the motel window and tossed the envelope out the window into a parking lot. Herzog went out to the parking lot and brought the money back, again offering it to Morris, saying, "Please don't do that again."^[3] Morris accepted the $2,000 and used it to take a trip to Vernon, Florida. Vernon was nicknamed Nub City because its residents participated in a particularly gruesome form of insurance fraud in which they deliberately amputated a limb in order to collect the insurance money. "In the hierarchy of nubbiedom, the supremely rewarding self-sacrifice was the loss of a right leg and a left arm, because, so the theory went, 'afterward, you could still write your name and still have a foot to press the gas pedal of your Cadillac.'"^[3] Morris's second documentary would be about the town and bear its name, although it makes no mention of Vernon as Nub City, but instead explores other idiosyncrasies of the town's residents. Morris made this omission because he received death threats while doing research; the town's residents were afraid that Morris would reveal their secret.

After spending two weeks in Vernon, Morris returned to Berkeley and began working on a script for a work of fiction that he called Nub City. After a few unproductive months, he happened to read a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle that read, "450 DEAD PETS GOING TO NAPA VALLEY". Morris left for Napa Valley and began working on the film that would become his first feature, Gates of Heaven. In 1978 when the film premiered, Werner Herzog cooked and publicly ate his shoe, an event later incorporated into a short documentary by Les Blank. Herzog had promised to eat his shoe if Morris completed the project, to challenge and encourage Morris, whom Herzog perceived as incapable of following up on the projects he conceived. At the public shoe-eating, Herzog suggested that he hoped the act would serve to encourage anyone having difficulty bringing a project to fruition.

Early career[link]

Gates of Heaven was given a limited release in the spring of 1981. Critic Roger Ebert was and remains today a champion of the film, including it on his all-time top ten best films list. Morris returned to Vernon in 1979 and again in 1980, renting a house in town and conducting interviews with the town's citizens. Vernon, FL premiered at the 1981 New York Film Festival. Newsweek called it, "a film as odd and mysterious as its subjects, and quite unforgettable." The film, like Gates of Heaven, suffered from poor distribution. It was released on video in 1987, and DVD in 2005.

After finishing Vernon, FL, Morris tried unsuccessfully to get funding for a variety of projects. There was Road, a story about an interstate highway in Minnesota; a project about Robert Golka, the creator of laser-induced fireballs in Utah; and the story of Centralia, Pennsylvania, the coal town in which an "inextinguishable subterranean fire" ignited in 1962. He eventually got funding in 1983 to write a script about John and Jim Pardue, a pair of Missouri bank robbers who had killed their father and grandmother and robbed five banks. Morris's pitch went, "The great bank-robbery sprees always take place at a time when something is going wrong in the country. Bonnie and Clyde were apolitical, but it's impossible to imagine them without the Depression as a back-drop. The Pardue brothers were apolitical, but it's impossible to imagine them without Vietnam." Morris wanted Tom Waits and Mickey Rourke to play the brothers, and he wrote the script, but the project eventually failed. Morris worked on writing scripts for various other projects, including a pair of ill-fated Stephen King adaptations.

In 1984 he married Julia Sheehan, whom he had met in Wisconsin while researching Ed Gein and other serial killers. Morris would later recall an early conversation with Julia: "I was talking to a mass murderer but I was thinking of you," he said, and instantly regretted it, afraid that it might not have sounded as affectionate as he had wished. But Julia was actually flattered: "I thought, really, that was one of the nicest things anyone ever said to me. It was hard to go out with other guys after that."

In 1985, Morris became interested in Dr. James Grigson, a psychiatrist in Dallas. Under Texas law, the death penalty can only be issued if the jury is convinced that the defendant is not only guilty, but will commit further violent crimes in the future if he is not put to death. Grigson had spent 15 years testifying for such cases, and he almost invariably gave the same damning testimony, often saying that it is "one hundred per cent certain" that the defendant would kill again.^[4] This led to Grigson being nicknamed "Dr. Death".^[5] Through Grigson, Morris would meet the subject of his next film, 36 year-old Randall Dale Adams.^[6]

Adams was serving a life sentence that had been commuted from a death sentence on a legal technicality for the 1976 murder of Robert Wood, a Dallas police officer. Adams told Morris that he had been framed, and that David Harris, who was present at the time of the murder and was the principal witness for the prosecution, had in fact killed Wood. Morris began researching the case because it related to Dr. Grigson; he was at first unconvinced of Adams's innocence. After reading the transcripts of the trial and meeting David Harris at a bar, however, Morris was no longer so sure.

At the time, Morris had been making a living as a private investigator for a well-known private detective agency that specialized in Wall Street cases. Bringing together his talents as an investigator and his obsessions with murder, narration and epistemology, Morris went to work on the case in earnest. Unedited interviews in which the prosecution's witnesses systematically contradicted themselves were used as testimony in Adams's 1986 habeas corpus hearing to determine if he would receive a new trial. David Harris famously confessed, in a roundabout manner, to killing Wood. Although Adams was finally found innocent after years of being processed by the legal system, the judge in the habeas corpus hearing officially stated that, "much could be said about those videotape interviews, but nothing that would have any bearing on the matter before this court." Regardless, The Thin Blue Line, as Morris's film would be called, was popularly accepted as the main force behind getting its subject, Randall Adams, out of prison. As Morris said of the film, "The Thin Blue Line is two movies grafted together. On one simple level is the question, Did he do it, or didn’t he? And on another level, The Thin Blue Line, properly considered, is an essay on false history. A whole group of people, literally everyone, believed a version of the world that was entirely wrong, and my accidental investigation of the story provided a different version of what happened."^[7]

Three years after the release of Adams, he sued Morris demanding a fair share of box office revenue. Morris stands by the belief that a subject should not be paid for being themselves, even in front of the camera. Aside from the fact that Adams was suing the very man who got him off of death row and out of prison all together, was the fact that Morris himself made absolutely no money on the movie.^{[citation needed]} The man supplements his income working on paid commercials for companies like Levi, Miller Beer, and Honda.

According to a survey by The Washington Post, The Thin Blue Line made dozens of critics' top ten lists for 1988, more than any other film that year. It won the documentary of the year award from both the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics. Despite its widespread acclaim, it was not nominated for an Oscar, which created a small scandal regarding the nomination practices of the Academy. The Academy cited the film's genre of "non-fiction", arguing that it was not actually a documentary. To this day, The Thin Blue Line is one of the most critically acclaimed documentaries ever made.

2000s[link]

Although Morris has achieved fame as a documentary filmmaker, he is also an accomplished director of television commercials. In 2002, Morris directed a series of television ads for Apple Computer as part of a popular "Switch" campaign. The commercials featured ex-Windows users discussing their various bad experiences that motivated their own personal switches to Macintosh. One commercial in the series, starring a high-school friend of his son Hamilton Morris, named Ellen Feiss, became an Internet fad. Morris has directed hundreds of commercials for various companies and products, including Adidas, AIG, Cisco Systems, Citibank, Kimberly-Clark's Depend brand, Levi's, Miller High Life, Nike, PBS, The Quaker Oats Company, Southern Comfort, EA Sports, Toyota and Volkswagen. Many of these commercials are available on his website.

In 2002, Morris was commissioned to make a short film for the 75th Academy Awards. He was hired based on his advertising resume, not his career as a director of feature-length documentaries. Those interviewed ranged from Laura Bush to Iggy Pop to Kenneth Arrow to Morris's 15 year old son Hamilton Morris . Morris was nominated for an Emmy for this short film. He considered editing this footage into a feature length film, focusing specifically on Donald Trump discussing Citizen Kane (This segment was later released on the second issue of Wholphin). Morris went on to make a second short for the 79th Academy Awards in 2007, this time interviewing the various nominees and asking them about their Oscar experiences.

In July 2004, Morris directed another series of commercials in the style of the "Switch" ads. This campaign featured Republicans who voted for Bush in the 2000 election giving their personal reasons for voting for Kerry in 2004. Upon completing more than 50 commercials, Morris had difficulty getting them on the air. Eventually the liberal advocacy group MoveOn PAC paid to air a few of the commercials. Morris eventually wrote an editorial for the New York Times discussing the commercials and Kerry's losing campaign.

In the fall of 2004, Morris also directed a series of noteworthy commercials for Sharp Electronics. The commercials enigmatically depicted various scenes from what appeared to be a short narrative that climaxed with a car crashing into a swimming pool. Each commercial showed a slightly different perspective on the events, and each ended with a cryptic weblink. The weblink was to a fake webpage advertising a prize offered to anyone who could discover the secret location of some valuable urns. It was in fact an alternate reality game. The original commercials can be found on Morris's website.

Morris also directed a series of spots for Reebok that featured rapper 50 Cent. The spots featured a title design by The Wilderness.

In 2004, Morris won the Best Documentary Oscar at the Academy Awards, for his film The Fog of War, about the career of Robert S. McNamara, who was famous for having been the Secretary of Defense who had led the nation into the Vietnam War under Presidents John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and who was also crucially involved in having helped President Kennedy avoid a Third World War over the issue of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. In the hauntingly re-enacted opening portion of the film concerning the background that McNamara and his pro-nuclear-war adversary U.S. General Curtis LeMay had shared together during World War II, director Morris brought out complexities in the character of McNamara, which the public had not previously recognized, but which largely shaped McNamara's positions regarding both the missiles-in-Cuba issue and the Vietnam War issue, and which therefore created the historical figure that McNamara turned out to be as the U.S. Secretary of Defense. In this documentary, Morris brought to a pinnacle the revolutionary technique that he had first introduced to the world in his 1988 The Thin Blue Line: the use of re-enactments in a documentary film—a technique (re-enactments) which had previously been thought to be inappropriate for use in a "documentary" film. However, by now, in 2004, the use of re-enactments in a documentary had become accepted by critics, and therefore this time around, Morris finally won the Academy Award that he should earlier have won also for his The Thin Blue Line, which had actually revolutionized documentary filmmaking.

In early 2010, a new Morris documentary had been submitted to several film festivals, including Toronto International Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, and Telluride Film Festival.^[8] The film, titled Tabloid,^[9] features interviews with Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming, who was convicted in absentia for the kidnap and indecent assault of a Mormon missionary in England during 1977.

Additionally Morris has been writing long-form journalism exploring different areas of his interest, published on the New York Times website. A collection of these essays, entitled Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, was published by Penguin Press on September 1, 2011. In November 2011, Morris premiered a documentary short, "The Umbrella Man," featuring Josiah "Tink" Thompson on the Kennedy assassination, on the opinion page of The New York Times online.

The Interrotron[link]

The Interrotron is a device similar to a teleprompter: Errol and his subject each sit facing a camera. The image of each person's face is then projected onto a two-way mirror positioned in front of the lens of the other's camera. Instead of looking at a blank lens, then, both Morris and his subject are looking directly at a human face. (Diagram) Morris believes that the machine helps to explore the relationship between "monologue and language, and how people present themselves to camera, and express themselves to camera."^[10]

The name "Interrotron" was coined by Morris's wife, who, according to Morris, "liked the name because it combined two important concepts — terror and interview."^[11]

Filmography[link]

• Gates of Heaven (1978)
• Vernon, Florida (1981)
• The Thin Blue Line (1988)
• The Dark Wind (1991)
• A Brief History of Time (1991)
• Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (1997)
• Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999)
• First Person (2000)
• The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003)
• Standard Operating Procedure (2008)
• Tabloid (2010)

Writing[link]

Books

• Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography (Penguin Press, 1 September 2011)
• A Wilderness Of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald (Penguin Press, forthcoming in 2012)

Essays

• "Will The Real Hooded Man Please Stand Up" (2007)
• "Which Came First, The Chicken or the Egg?" (2007)
• "Cartesian Blogging, Part One" (2007)
• "Play It Again, Sam (Re-Enactments, Part One)" (2008)
• "Play It Again, Sam (Re-Enactments, Part Two)" (2008)
• "The Most Curious Thing" (2008)
• "Cartesian Blogging, Part Two" (2008)
• "People in the Middle" (2008)
• "Photography as a Weapon" (2008)
• "Cartesian Blogging, Part Three" (2008)
• "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall" (2009)
• "Whose Father Was He?" (2009)
• "Bamboozling Ourselves" (2009)
• "Seven Lies About Lying" (2009)
• "The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock" (2009)
• "The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What It Is" (2010)
• "The Ashtray" (2011)
• "Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck?" (2011)

Awards and honors[link]

• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007)^[12]
• Jury Grand Prix Silver Bear at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival for Standard Operating Procedure
• Academy Award for Documentary Feature The Fog of War (2004)
• Best Documentary of the Year awards for The Fog of War (2003): the National Board of Review, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Chicago Film Critics, and the Washington D.C. Area Film Critics.
• 2002 International Documentary Association list of the 20 all-time best documentaries: The Thin Blue Line (#2), Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (#14)^[13]
• Emmy for Best Commercial for PBS commercial "Photobooth" (2001)
• In December 2001, the United States' National Film Preservation Foundation announced that Morris's The Thin Blue Line would be one of the 25 films selected that year for preservation in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress, bringing the total at the time to 325.
• MacArthur Fellowship (1989)
• Washington Post Best Film of the Year for The Thin Blue Line (1988)
• New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics Best Documentary for The Thin Blue Line (1988)
• Golden Horse for Best Foreign Film at the Taiwan International Film Festival for The Thin Blue Line (1988)
• Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture, from the Mystery Writers of America, for The Thin Blue Line (1989)
• Gates of Heaven (1978) has long been on Roger Ebert's list of the ten greatest films ever made.

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Errol Morris

• Errol Morris's website
• Errol Morris on Twitter
• Errol Morris at the Internet Movie Database
• Errol Morris on Charlie Rose
• Works by or about Errol Morris in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Errol Morris collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• Errol Morris at Rotten Tomatoes)
• Errol Morris (Jonathan Crow, Allmovie)
• Errol Morris (Nina Rehfeld, GreenCine)
• Voices on Antisemitism Interview with Errol Morris from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Werner Herzog in coversation with Errol Morris (The Believer)

Morris E. Day (born December 13, 1957) is an American musician, composer and actor. He is best known as the lead singer of The Time.

Musical career[link]

1970s and 1980s[link]

In high school, Day was in a band with Prince and André Cymone and the trio formed an early band managed by Day's mother called "Grand Central," later renamed "Champagne." Later, Prince embarked on a solo career but retained Cymone for his backing band. The two began to plan a side-group that would focus more on R&B, while Prince would continue to explore various musical styles. The Time was composed of 4 members from an earlier funk group called "Flyte Tyme," but the lead singer had not been chosen. Charles Cobb was considered but he turned it down. Sue Ann Carwell was auditioned; and Alexander O'Neal nearly became The Time's lead singer, but dropped out due to payment negotiations. Day, who was now in a band called "Enterprise", allowed Prince to have a song called "Partyup" for his Dirty Mind album, and Prince would soon return the favor by giving Day the job of lead singer. Day would suggest guitarist Jesse Johnson, who completed the band's ensemble.

The Time's most prolific and visible period came in 1984, when Day played the antagonist to Prince in his feature films Purple Rain and Graffiti Bridge, which helped establish Day's playboy stage presence. Typically escorted by his valet, "Jerome" (Jerome Benton), Day won fans with his exaggerated vanity ("Jerome bring me my mirror!") and strutting bravado ("Ain't nobody bad like me!"), acting as a comic foil to Prince's romantic, sensitive lead. This persona was further exploited for comic effect on The Time's records, on songs such as "Chili Sauce" and "If the Kid Can't Make You Come" from the album Ice Cream Castle.

That album, the group's most popular, is best remembered for the infectious singles "Jungle Love" and the Rufus Thomas influenced, "The Bird." With their palpable pop energy and catchy choruses, both songs were hits on both urban and pop radio.

In 1984, Day appeared on a duet with singer Vanity on "Mechanical Emotion" from her debut album Wild Animal. With the breakup of The Time that same year, Day began his solo career. The low sales of his solo albums such as 1987's Daydreaming (which spawned the single "Fishnet") and his most commercially viable solo album, Guaranteed were a blow to his career.

In 1986 Morris Day married Judith Day. They were married for 22 years—until 2008. They had three children together.

1990s[link]

It wasn't until 1990 that The Time scored a #1 R&B hit with "Jerk Out," a Dance-funk cut from their reunited fourth album, Pandemonium. This album also featured the original members of the band. The same year, Day formed his own girl band (not unlike Prince's Vanity 6/Apollonia 6) called The Day Zs. The group's first and only album release was produced by Day and he sang on one of the tracks called "Green Acres."

From that high point, Day's success began to wane. The general decline of Prince's popularity soon after did not help and Day's public visibility, and his creative output waned considerably.

2000 to present[link]

Day came out of his self-imposed retirement because of his fans' support. Day has remained a popular concert draw since the late 1990s, fronting a revamped lineup of The Time, including originals Jellybean Johnson on drums and Monte Moir on keyboards. The band was invited to perform on Prince's direct to video concert film, "Rave Un2 The Year 2000", in December 1999.

Day has also appeared regularly in local television commercials for a Toyota dealership in the Atlanta area.

As of 2007, Day is band leader on the TV One program Baisden After Dark.

He reunited with the original members of The Time after 18 years for a performance with Rihanna at the 50th Grammy Awards show.

Morris Day and The Time performed at the 2008 HR Florida State Conference.

Acting career[link]

Day continued to act in films from time to time in small parts (including a brief but memorable turn in Richard Pryor's Moving, and the Andrew Dice Clay (1990 film) The Adventures of Ford Fairlane). Day's presence on the screen decreased until, in 2001, he returned to film in Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, performing "Jungle Love" with The Time and dancing with the movie's stars in the film's coda, and being introduced emphatically by Jason Mewes' character as "Morris Day and The motherfuckin' Time!".

Day also appeared on the small screen in 1990 when he portrayed the character Lamarr on ABC's short-lived sitcom New Attitude. He guest-starred on the sitcom Eve as a pimp who wanted Eve's fashion boutique to design a flamboyant suit to match his witty personality, and appeared as himself in an episode on the series Moesha, attempting to file a lawsuit against Moesha's ex-boyfriend Q, who used a sample from "The Oak Tree" without permission. He also appeared on 227 in the 80's.

He appeared opposite James Avery and Matthew Stewart in a pilot called Heart & Soul.

Appearances in popular culture[link]

In the 1980s and 1990s, WWF wrestler "Birdman" Koko B. Ware used "The Bird" as his entrance theme.

He appeared with The Time at the end of the movie "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" and was referred to as the main characters' favorite band.

In 1994, Day was featured on and provided the chorus and accompanying vocals for rapper K-Dee's song "Gigolos Get Lonely Too" from the Ass, Gas, or Cash (No One Rides for Free) album. This song was essentially a direct sampling of a similarly named "Gigolos Get Lonely Too", recorded by The Time in the 80's.

A song called "Morris Day" appears on the album Felt, Vol. 2: A Tribute to Lisa Bonet by the hip-hop group Felt.

Discography[link]

Albums[link]

The Time[link]

• The Time (Warner Bros., 1981)
• What Time Is It? (Warner Bros., 1982)
• Ice Cream Castle (Warner Bros., 1984)
• Pandemonium (Paisley Park Records, 1990) #18 US
• Condensate (as The Original 7ven)( Saguaro Road Records 2011)

Solo[link]

• Color of Success (Warner Bros., 1985)
• Daydreaming (Warner Bros., 1987)
• Guaranteed (Reprise, 1992)
• It's About Time (Hollywood, 2004)

Singles[link]

Solo[link]

The Time[link]

Filmography[link]

With Prince[link]

• Graffiti Bridge
• Purple Rain

Other appearances[link]

• Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
• Moesha
• Moving
• The Adventures of Ford Fairlane
• Eve

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• Morris Day at the Internet Movie Database

Morris Goodman (1925 – November 14, 2010, Michigan^[1]) was an American scientist known for his work in molecular evolution and molecular systematics. Goodman was a Distinguished Professor at the Center for Molecular Medicine and Genetics at Wayne State University School of Medicine, editor-in-chief of the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, and a member of the anthropology section of the United States National Academy of Sciences.

Life and work[link]

Goodman, grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and spent many years in Detroit Michigan as the only Wayne State University faculty member appointed to the National Academy of Science until his death on November 14, 2010. After high school, he attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison for one year, then in 1943 entered the Army Air Forces, where he served as a navigator for the remainder of World War II. He was married in 1946, shortly after returning to college. He became interested in science after a comparative anatomy course; the professor, Harold Wolfe, recruited him as a teaching assistant. Goodman graduated with a degree in zoology and a minor in biochemistry, and continued on at Wisconsin for his Masters and Ph.D. degrees under Wolfe (a former student of Alan Boyden). Upon finishing a dissertation on the antigen-antibody precipitin reaction, he went to Caltech for post-doctoral work, supported by an NIH fellowship.^[2]

Working with Dan Campbell at Caltech (within the Division of Chemistry headed by Linus Pauling), Goodman worked on the immunological properties of hemoglobins, including the immunological differences between normal and sickle-cell hemoglobin. According to a 2004 interview, Goodman became interested in evolutionary problems around 1957-1958. After research stints at the University of Illinois Medical School and the Detroit Institute of Cancer Research, he embarked—with his friend Morris Wilson—on studies of the degree of variability in proteins expressed early vs. late in development.^[2]

By 1961, Goodman's comparative immunology research produced some results, particularly on the evolutionary relationships among primates, that were attracting interest from evolutionary biologists. He presented his ideas at the New York Academy of Sciences and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. At the latter meeting, he and two others using molecular approaches to evolutionary problems (Emile Zuckerkandl and Harold Klinger) were confronted by three of the "framers" of the modern evolutionary synthesis: Ernst Mayr, G. G. Simpson, and Theodosius Dobzhansky. During the early history of molecular evolution, traditional evolutionists were both interested in and apprehensive about the advent of molecular techniques to evolutionary biology; Simpson later referred to Goodman as "an old friendly antagonist.".^[2]

Through the 1960s and 1970s, Goodman continued his evolutionary work based on serology, eventually with graduate students working under him. In the 1970s he also started using protein sequence data for his molecular taxonomy work. In a 1975 paper in Nature,^[3] Goodman and his collaborators used sequence data to reconstruct the evolutionary history of hemoglobin (including possible ancestral sequences) and analyze which sites on the hemoglobin complex had evolved at which stages. Goodman called this the first "hard evidence of Darwinian evolution". In 1982, with another Nature paper,^[4] Goodman did the same for the DNA sequences of the hemoglobin genes.^[2]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Morris Goodman faculty profile - Wayne State University School of Medicine

Heather Morris
Morris at the San Diego Comic-Con International, July 2010
Born	Heather Elizabeth Morris (1987-02-01) February 1, 1987 (age 25) Thousand Oaks, California, U.S.
Occupation	Dancer, actress, singer
Years active	2006–present
Height	1.73 m (5 ft 8 in)

Heather Elizabeth Morris (born February 1, 1987) is an American actress, dancer, and singer, known for her role as the cheerleader Brittany S. Pierce in the musical comedy series Glee.

Early life[link]

She began dancing when she was one.^[1] Morris competed at a young age in a variety of styles including jazz, tap, and contemporary. Morris's father passed away of cancer when she was 14 years old. "It's something that is hard for me, because I'm sad about it, but I don't dwell on it," she said during an interview workshop with students in December 2009. "I know he's in a better place, instead of suffering."^[2][3] After graduating from Desert Mountain High School, Morris decided to enroll in a local university but realized she was in the wrong place and moved to L.A. instead at age 19.^[4]

Career[link]

Morris' first significant appearance was in 2006 on So You Think You Can Dance Season 2 where she made the "green mile" or "Vegas Week" but failed to make the final 20 by a vote of 3-2.^[5]

Not discouraged, Morris moved to Los Angeles and actively pursued a career in dancing and was trained in jazz dance. Her big break came in 2007 via Beyoncé. Morris was one of Beyoncé's backup dancers on The Beyoncé Experience world tour and,^[6] following that, worked again with Beyoncé on a mini "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" promotional tour that included 2008 performances on the American Music Awards,^[7] Saturday Night Live,^[8] The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Today,^[8] and MTV's Total Request Live Finale. She also danced backup for Beyoncé and Tina Turner at the 50th Grammy Awards in 2008.^[9][10] She later appeared in a small role in the movie Fired Up, where she met choreographer Zach Woodlee. Following that film, Woodlee brought Morris in to dance on other shows he was choreographing, including episodes of Eli Stone and Swingtown, the movie Bedtime Stories, and eventually Glee.^[11]

In December 2010 Morris was named the Celebrity Style Ambassador for FLIRT! Cosmetics, an Estee Lauder cosmetics line.^[12]

In 2010 Morris made the Maxim Hot 100 list, coming in at number 85. On the AfterEllen hot 100 list she was ranked #2 behind Naya Rivera.

In 2011 Morris starred in a back-to-school commercial for Staples Canada that featured her dancing.

In the October 2011 issue of Fitness magazine, Heather Morris stated that she has had her breast implants removed. She was quoted saying "Implants were something I thought I wanted when I was younger, and now I don't, It was hard being active with them, because my chest was always sore. It hurt a lot, and I didn't like always being in pain, so they had to go!"^[13] Her breast implant surgery was done sometime between her time on So You Think You Can Dance at age 18 and age 21 when she was a backup dancer for Beyoncé. ^[14]

[edit] Glee

Morris was taking acting classes and actively pursuing an acting career when she was asked by Woodlee to teach the choreography for Beyoncé's "Single Ladies" dance to the Glee actors. At the same time, the show was looking for a third cheerleader, and Morris ended up landing the role of Brittany.^[8] Initially a background character who hardly ever spoke, the role grew as writers discovered Morris had a gift for delivering one-liners.^[15] Jarrett Wieselman of the New York Post opined that Morris has "emerged as one of the funniest second bananas on TV right now"^[16] and the LA Times wrote of having a "...comedy crush on Morris, who plays the galactically dim Glee Club cheerleader Brittany".^[17]

When a promotional clip for the episode "Sectionals" indicated that Brittany Pierce and Santana Lopez had slept together, Dorothy Snarker, writing for lesbian entertainment website After Ellen, praised the pairing, referring to them by the portmanteau "Brittana".^[18] Snarker called the two her "new favorite Glee pairing", commenting that: "While Heather Morris (Brittany) and Naya Rivera (Santana) have had minimal screen time, they've made it count. Heather in particular has brought the laughs as the Cheerio least likely to get a Mensa invitation. Never mind Finn and Rachel — I'm on Team Brittana now."^[18]

Morris' role became more prominent during the final nine episodes of season one and, due to the overwhelmingly positive response to her character, was promoted to official series regular status during season two.^[19] She was at the center of the second episode, "Britney/Brittany", (a tribute to Britney Spears) where she made her singing debut covering Spears' "I'm a Slave 4 U" solo and dueting with Naya Rivera on "Me Against the Music". She later got many other singing, and dancing solos. The second half of season two saw Morris' character engage in a lesbian storyline with Rivera's character. Both the arc along with Rivera's and Morris' performances were met with critical acclaim. As on Glee, Morris is best friends in real life with co-star Rivera.^[20]

In Season 3, her and Rivera's characters continues with the lesbian storyline, and others. For example she had a large role in the episode "Promasaurus".

During the 2011 Glee Tour Heather performed Britney Spears' song "I'm a Slave 4 U". She also had a dance spotlight with castmate Harry Shum Jr. during Naya Rivera's performance of "Valerie," and was one of the dancers in the Single Ladies and Safety Dance numbers.

Morris co-wrote and appeared in a January 2011 video for Funny or Die, "Nuthin' But A Glee Thang," a take-off of the Dr. Dre/Snoop Dogg collaboration "Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang". Co-written with actresses Ashley Lendzion and Riki Lindhome, the video features appearances from Modern Family's Sofia Vergara and Morris's Glee castmates Matthew Morrison, Cory Monteith, Harry Shum, Jr., and Naya Rivera.^[21]

Filmography[link]

Morris in March 2011

Awards and nominations[link]

Discography[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Heather Morris

• Heather Morris at the Internet Movie Database