My dear departed father Frank De Felitta (1921-2016) spent much of the 1960s as a writer/producer/director of documentaries at NBC news. I’ve posted them all on Youtube and I highly recommend (natch) taking a look at them. One of the best is ‘The Battle Of The Bulge’, shot in 1963
If you were sitting around your house in Los Angeles on the night of April 1st 1974 and had the TV tuned (as it once was said) to KTLA Channel 5, you would have seen the above two minutes of ads. It’s the night before the 46th Academy Awards which
Here’s one of those before/after looks at LA in the 30s (and earlier) as seen in Hal Roach comedies and the same exact locations now. In this case it’s not movie locations themselves that we’re seeing but the site of the Hal Roach studio. The main building is a handsome
During the Second World War, most of Walt Disney’s staff of animators and directors wound up being drafted into the service to make army-related films and cartoons. (What kind of cartoons? Animations about the dangers of V.D.? These must have been rather peculiar, don’t you think? A subject for further
To compliment yesterday’s posting of old stock footage of the old Pennsylvania Station (scroll down to see–I don’t feel like pasting a link), here’s a minute of stock footage of Grand Central Station in the 1920s. The footage isn’t speed-corrected, the image quality is execrable and the time code window-burn
Above I’ve posted a short clip of Nicholas Ray describing how the ending of ‘In A Lonely Place’ developed, going from a nice, neatly tied-up thriller ending (Frank Lovejoy bursts in and arrests Dixon Steele) and instead becoming the ambivalent, unsettlingly unanswered ending that leaves us wondering what will happen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4a5sAUJ9v4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjg0hK1G2Nchttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1Gm1cCnejM Pennsylvania Station (which connected the biggest railroad in the country to the greatest city in the country after years of New York being accessible only by Ferry after disembarking a Penn train) was built in the first decade of the 20th century and, in an act of monumental vandalism,
Billy ‘Froggy’ Laughlin appeared in Our Gang comedies over a four year period–1940-44. As these were the MGM produced OG’s, they weren’t in the least funny–MGM seems to have had a humor-block what with ‘Tom and Jerry’ being the best they could come up with in the cartoon department and
When I was a young’un growing up in LA in the mid-seventies I was a serious radio-head. I loved all forms of audio entertainment–live radio talk shows, old vintage comedy shows, KJOI (elevator music non-stop) and even the stray TV channel that you could accidentally find on an obscure frequency.
Here’s another one of these wonderful before-after looks at the locations of a 1929 Our Gang comedy then with dissolves into images of the exact area now. Scroll down and read yesterday’s post to understand who’s doing this cool work and what we’ve learned about the neighborhood now known as