Behold this most eccentric of movie trailers. It’s a four minute theatrical trailer for ‘Paper Moon’ which features Ryan O’Neal, Tatum O’Neal and…Peter Bogdanovich. Indeed the wunderkind director is all over this, mugging with the cast, laughing off-camera, playing director with great enthusiasm etc. It reminds us of what a
This past Saturday the Directors Guild of America gave a memorial tribute (via Zoom) to the late great Peter Bogdanovich. I was the moderator and the guests included Frank Marshall, Bennett Miller, Cybill Shepard, David O. Russell, Chuck Workman, Doug McGrath and –via tape (or whatever we call whatever captures
Enjoy ‘Porky’s Cafe’ from 1942 directed by Chuck Jones (who was still young enough to be more stodgily credited as Charles M. Jones). The minimalism here is rather striking–the cafe is done all in shades of grey with nothing hanging on the walls. There is precisely one customer. Porky runs
Today’s “whatever happened to the real New York” video comes in the form a gussied-up tourist public relations ‘video’ (ten years before their were ‘videos’) shot in the early 70s. Lightning fast cutting and annoying music take us through a whiz-bang tour of the city during the John Lindsey era.
Here’s a few minutes of ghostly, black and white silent footage of the area around Broadway and 88th/89th streets in 1971. Nothing of any interest happens–which is what makes it oddly fascinating (to me at least). The everydayness of this portrait gives it an unintended weight–it achieves gravitas through its
‘Learn To Croon’ is a song written by Sam Coslow and Arthur Johnston for the movie ‘College Humor’ (1934) and was introduced by Bing Crosby. If anyone remembers the song today though, it’s because of the excruciating rendition given by Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer in ‘Our Gang Follies of 1938’. If
The actor Carl Switzer, popularly known as Alfalfa in the Our Gang comedies of the 1930s, was clearly a tortured man. He was perceived by George ‘Spanky’ McFarland as ‘cocky…a little antsy’ and other cast members recall him causing trouble on the set by creating pranks that hurt other people
I tried–I really tried–to find a non-Warner Brothers cartoon to post this AM. But the sad truth is that as lovingly crafted and artfully achieved any number of vintage cartoons are–and I speak of ‘Tom and Jerry’, ‘Woody Woodpecker’ and everything Disney–they simply can’t hold a candle to the Merrie
To close this little mini-Jerry Lewis/Count Basie festival here’s a clip from the 1977 MDA telethon featuring Jerry sort-of conducting the Count Basie band doing their famous ‘April In Paris’ arrangement. These were, for me, the prime years of the telethon–I regularly ‘stayed up with Jerry to watch the stars
This justifiably famous clip of Jerry ‘lip-syncing’ to Count Basie’s recording ‘Blues In Hoss Flat’ is from ‘The Errand Boy’ (1961) and really is ‘Jerry for people who hate Jerry’. The Youtuber who posted this (who calls themselves TBirdsof1965) went back to the original Basie album, ‘Chairman Of The Board’