Here’s a little treat for you. Some color footage shot of the 1938 Oscars, giving us views of Frank Capra (bouncy, bubbly and looking rather like Chaplin did when he wasn’t suited up as the Tramp), W.C.Fields (who never appeared in a color movie, thus making this a rare view
You would expect that an awards show filled with people who work in the entertainment industry would be a fairly professional event, one in which speeches are read with a modicum of stumbling mistakes, names are pronounced properly and audiences behave reasonably well. But if you’ve been following my ‘Dopey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3AuRaJ86dkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoNdQxkI-0w Above are two of Katherine Hepburn’s no-shows for her Oscar wins (there were four). The first is for ‘Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner’–the award is accepted by her long-time director, pal and landlord George Cukor. It’s not nearly as interesting an event as the second clip, though. In this
I have to assume that the upcoming Harvey Weinstein/Kevin Spacey/James Franco-free Academy Awards ceremony will be packed with well-meaning but uncomfortable to watch speeches about the events of the past four months and perhaps even beyond, stretching back to the day the worlds largest audience ever watched the Presidential Inauguration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzmb6SxgUyYhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3qRWg2E_mQ Since the reason for this weeks muddle of detours was the Gertrude Lawrence musical biopic ‘Star’ with Julie Andrews (this led to Alexander Woolcott to George S. Kaufman to Moss Hart and Judy Garland etc) let’s circle back to the real culprit here. I speak of the greatest star
Just as watching ‘Star’ led to visiting Alexander Woolcott’s island retreat (see below), so has that detour led to today’s detour. George S. Kaufman, Broadway craftsman playright/director/theater critic/Algonquin Round Table wit, was one of Woolcott’s regular visitors, cronies, pals, co-sophisticates. In the fifties he took to appearing on network game
Above is a short, pleasant and slightly haunting clip of Rock Hudson discussing ‘Giant’, Elizabeth Taylor and director George Stevens. Hudson was in his mid fifties when this was shot and would shortly be dead of AIDS. He’s awfully genial and his smile and demeanor really do make you want
Here’s my old friend and film school advisor Eddie Dmytryk talking to the same two French guys as in the previous post (scroll down, dammit) for the mysterious TV program ‘Cinema, Cinemas’ (translation: ‘Theater, Theaters’). As always with Eddie, much time is devoted to his infamous blacklisting and subsequent recanting.
Back in the 1980s, cinema journalists Phillippe Garnier and Claude Ventura seem to have created a show consisting of interviews with Hollywood directors (and occasionally actors) that I can only presume was made for French TV. Titled ‘Cinema, Cinemas’ (English translantion: ‘Film, Films’ or, colloquially, ‘Movie, Movies’) the show consists
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32Oym82CAlI Yes, Ryan Murphy’s much-anticipated “The Feud” promises to take us behind the scenes of the legendary “Whatever Happened To Baby Jane”, showing us the no-doubt tense and downright nasty dynamic between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. But what was it really like on that fabled set? The answer is