https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TtERu8NKf8 A few days ago I posted a video of Vincente Minnelli’s abandoned mansion in Beverly Hills. It’s a fascinating and acrid experience to witness the shards of a once worldly and elegant existence. So lets close the week with a more sophisticated and Minelli-esque moment and bring the man
Before you read any further let me quickly give you fair warning that the above posted videos are a complete and total waste of time, lacking in anything remotely akin to cultural interest, intellectual rigor or even pop-culture delight. Still, I find the mid-show plugs that aired in the middle
For many years I would drive by a large, dilapidated house that sits on the corner of Sunset Blvd. and Crescent Drive–the house is angled so as to be literally facing the Beverly Hills Hotel across the street–and wonder why the hell somebody didn’t buy it and fix it up.
Here’s one of those weirdly mesmerizing ‘history of a logo’ videos that are a staple of a complete Youtube diet. This is the history of the 20th Century Fox logo over a 100 year period. I knew that William Fox, an independent film distributor/producer, was the originator of things somehow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0emVTQEWhjM Dig a live radio remote from the premiere of Judy Garland’s 1954 “A Star Is Born”, featuring the voices of Judy Garland, Moss Hart (who wrote the script) and Kitty Carlisle (Hart’s wife). Moss Hart sounds like a man playing the role of a playwright named Moss Hart and
‘Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb’ (1938) is the 31st short comedy made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. The film was released on Friday, May 20th 1938 (the 140th day of the Gregorian Calendar). Dates of the actual shoot are for some reason missing but we can surmise it was
All week we’ve been dancing around the first ‘Crime of the Century’, the 1924 murder of a youth named Bobby Franks by two wealthy Chicago teenagers. So let’s end things with a nice, crisp History Channel doc on the crime. Aside from those dreadful ‘reenactment’ shots using non-speaking (and therefore
Continuing this week’s Leopold and Loeb theme, here’s a clip of Alfred Hitchcock on The Dick Cavett Show’ discussing, among other things, the long-take method of the movie that I described in yesterday’s post. Far from the forbidding figure we sometimes think of him as, Hitch is amusing, droll and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ggnZ-2Ns54 Welcome bac;k to Leopold and Loeb week. On Monday I posted Henry Fonda’s tour de force performance as Clarence Darrow, the lawyer who successfully kept Leopold and Loeb from being executed. Yesterday we watched the trailer of the L&L inspired movie ‘Compulsion’. Today lets watch a very impressive long-take
Yesterday I posted about Meyer Levin’s novel ‘Compulsion’, based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case that rocked the world in 1924. The novel was turned into a play by Levin and then into a movie produced by Darryl Zanuck and directed by Richard Fleisher. Now I’m impatiently waiting for