Mel Brooks has a number of set-piece story/anecdotes/routines that he’s perfected the telling and performing of over the years. (His marvelous one-man show, recorded at the Geffen Theater a few years ago, is essentially a compendium of a bunch of them). But for my money the greatest of them all
As I am an hour away from heading to the airport to catch a flight to Los Angeles this seemed to be an appropriate posting. It’s an odd little one minute reel of home movies shot in L.A. (mostly) in 1939 which then, inexplicably, shifts to color footage of old
Above is a four minute short made by Mel Brooks and Ernest Pintoff in 1964 called ‘The Critic’. It will explain itself, and very amusingly at that. Inspired by the work of Canadian animator Norman McClaren it features a series of curious visuals accompanied by the grumblings of an aging
Here’s a five minute snippet of a longer, quite interesting looking documentary about the great film and theater director Rouben Mamoulian. There are so many things to praise YouTube for but not requiring people to include basic information about the obscure things that they’re posting is hugely unacceptable. The only
Peter Falk’s acceptance speech for his 1972 win for ‘Columbo’ is a delight. Did he write it? I don’t know. I do know that he lived next door to Jack Benny and two doors down from Lucille Ball. And across the street from Ira Gershwin and Rosemary Clooney. And what
‘Murder Inc.’, a semi-low-budget New York production shot in 1960, would likely not even be a cinematic footnote today had it not been for the presence of the young, then-unknown Peter Falk playing vicious psychopathic gangster Abe Reles (a real guy–‘Kid Twist’ they called him, for some reason). Falk’s off-kilter
He’s a very nice few minutes of Peter Falk discussing his fond memories of his friend and collaborator John Cassavetes. Falk is, as always, magnetic–hard to take your eyes off, insightful, articulate etc. Alas, I directed him in 2003 in a forgettable movie called ‘The Thing About My Folks’ and
Here’s a 1970 Dick Cavett show featuring the above three actors doing an an appearance to promote Cassavetes’ then-new film ‘Husbands’. This excerpt is only about half of the segment (the rest is lying around in tatters somewhere on Youtube) but it’s enough to give you the general idea of
Here’s a French documentary about John Cassavetes shot in two parts–in Hollywood in 1966 and in France in 1969. In the first section we see Cassavetes driving along Mulholland Drive to his house on Woodrow Wilson Drive in the Hollywood Hills. (The house will of course be familiar to any
Here’s one minute of sound effects from various Three Stooges movies. The fact that somebody actually contemplated doing this idiotic project and then willfully executed it is hilariously impressive to me. Props to them. I can’t exactly say that it will make you want to watch a Stooges short, but