Thanks to the Fox Movietone sound-on-film technology, we have documentary views of many strange and interesting habitats with the actual sound captured as well. England, India, the Midwest, Long Beach California–all are pictured in the late 20s/early 30s and are available on Youtube. (By the way, my son just pointed
In the interests of keeping this blog (such an early 21st century term) from becoming a Laurel and Hardy tribute site, I’ve posted the above 1979 commercial for Milk. Don’t ask why. There doesn’t have to be a reason for everything. But I’ve always admired the drum fill toward the
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