Here’s 50 seconds of black and white footage of the ‘Cleopatra’ set, specifically the moment where Liz Taylor is carried down from the Sphinx thingy. It looks awfully scary and shaky but Liz seems sanguine, posed regally and most likely heavily sedated. I have no clue as to how this
I knew that the beginnings of the 1963 Burton and Taylor ‘Cleopatra’ were a bit more murky than the famously catastrophic shoot itself (the making of the ill-fated behemoth has been well documented over the years in any of a number of books about Burton/Taylor/Mankiewicz/Zanuck/Fox etc.) It’s common knowledge (in
Behold a four minute clip of the restored Technicolor ‘Rhapsody In Blue’ sequence from 1930s ‘King Of Jazz’, a gigantic musical revue (they were all the rage in Hollywood at the time) featuring Paul Whiteman and his orchestra. This immaculate restoration shows us for the first time what audiences saw
Here’s a truly precious piece of footage. It’s a Technicolor screen test featuring Katherine Hepburn playing Joan of Arc. We know from the slate that it was photographed on May 22nd, 1934 on Stage 5 at RKO. The cameraman was Ray Rennahan. No director is listed–did Hepburn self-direct? Evern more
After yesterday’s post on the 3-Strip Technicolor process as demonstrated in the ‘before and after’ reel of scenes from ‘Becky Sharp’, I’ve begun a slow and pleasant dive into a rabbit hole of Technicolor history. Above is a series of ‘color tests’ from 1933-1936 made for Pioneer Pictures, a subsidiary
This past weekend we watched the restored version of Rouben Mamoulian’s 1935 ‘Becky Sharp’ which was the first feature shot and released in the beautiful and sadly long-gone Three-Strip Technicolor process. Old Three-Strip Technicolor films without restoration tend to look like bowls of multi-flavored bowl melted sherbet. If one didn’t
On March 11th 1927, the Fox Movietone cameras were sent out to Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan to shoot some footage of stylish young flappers traipsing about the area outside of Saks Fifth Avenue, presumably for a newsreel featurette. The surviving footage–just a snippet of what was shot–has been colorized
Having just come from a doctor’s appointment on 31st Street between Park and Madison and thus having spied the lurking grandeur of the Empire State Building on nearby Fifth Avenue, I decided to search out the famously scary photographs of the workmen sauntering around the framework high in the sky
On Saturday the 12th of February the Directors Guild of America presented a tribute to the late, great Melvin Van Peebles. A distinguished roster of filmmakers participated on the panel, including Michael Mann, Reginald Hudlin, Michael Schultz, Mario Van Peebles (naturally) and others. It was an invigorating look at Van
I believe this footage of a gentle cruise down Hollywood Blvd. in the 60s shows us the fabled (and never nearly as glamorous as out-of-towners expected it to be) heading east–there are some helpful captions giving street names along the way. Unlike the previous two days posts (which I highly