Yesterday I posted about my friend and collaborator actor Burt Young who passed away last week but whose death was only announced yesterday. I’ve been working on a doc about Burt for a helluva long time–here’s a link to the trailer. Burt was a mystery wrapped in an enigma inside
The great character actor/painter/writer Burt Young (a.k.a. too many alternate names to list here) passed away ten days ago, though his death was only publicly announced yesterday. Burt was my good friend and collaborator–I directed him in two movies and spent a great deal of time with him making a
Above, witness the still horrific climactic carousel-out-of-control scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Strangers On A Train’. The previous two days I’ve posted on Raymond Chandler, including a fine mini-doc on the corruption filled Los Angeles of the 1930s that inspired his early writing as well as a cameo appearance by the
I’ve seen ‘Double Indemnity’ (screenplay by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler based on James M. Cain’s novel) about a thousand times over the past fifty years and never knew–or frankly cared about– the identity of a man sitting outside Barton Keyes’s (Edward G. Robinson) office. Sixteen or so minutes into
Dig this nifty mini-doc (27 packed minutes) that is not about Raymond Chandler per se. It’s about the corrupt doings of Los Angeles in the 1930s and how they inspired and impacted what Chandler wrote about as his mid-life career as a writer was launched (he’d been an executive at
‘Heavenly Daze’ (1947) is the 109th short comedy made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Monday, June 23 through Thursday, June 26 1947 and released on Thursday, September 2, 1948 (the 246th day on the Gregorian Calendar). The film is a complete misfire, a stunningly
See that top video of New York City in 1956? See the video below it of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier Book 2? Roll them both simultaneously (the NYC footage has no sound) and spend a few minutes of your Friday taking a poignant time travel trip to a New York
Yesterday I posted legendary AM pop DJ Dan Ingram’s broadcast during the Great East Coast Blackout of 1965. Today we’re digging excerpts of Ingram on his 77 WABC afternoon music show from February 26th, 1975. This is classic Ingram stuff–a lesson in pure DJ word jamming, a lost art (I
On November 9, 1965, shortly after 5PM, New York City began experiencing the ominous signs of an impending blackout due to a gradual loss of available electricity. The cause of the failure was the setting of a protective relay on one of the transmission lines near Niagara Falls. The safety
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwQx8xyGacU In 1959 Larry King–born Lawrence Heiger–was a twenty-six year old Disc Jockey working in Miami. His first broadcast was on May 1, 1957, working as the disc jockey from 9 a.m. to noon. (He also did two afternoon newscasts and a sportscast, for which he was paid $50 a