https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvxwf1jxdaMhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb1KndrrXsY Above I’ve posted two views of the infamous Paul Masson wine commercials which helped support Orson Welles and his filmmaking career throughout the 1970s. The first consists of outtakes and the second shows the finished commercial. Unfortunately, as the outtakes show, Welles is too drunk to perform. The director
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeCU0uaMURE In addition to booze and cigarettes, Humphrey Bogart’s great passion was sailing his yacht which was named ‘Santana’. Much as city kid James Cagney yearned for the wide open spaces of country life (see yesterday’s post) city kid Bogie yearned for the open air of the sea. Both men
For many years James Cagney divided his time between a country-esque retreat in Coldwater Canyon, high above Beverly Hills, and a Martha’s Vineyard spread that is nothing if not wildly appealing. But, with a fervor that only a once poor city kid (Cagney grew up in the Yorkville section of New York
‘Even As I.O.U.’ (1942) was the 65th comedy short subject made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Saturday, April 18th through Wednesday, April 22 1942 and was released on Friday, September 18th of that year (the 261st day on the Gregorian calendar). This top-notch Curly
Let’s close this week of 1970s Los Angeles heritage with this quite interesting news segment focusing on the then newly out gay community of West Hollywood. ‘Two on the Town,” was a local Los Angeles series broadcast by KCBS-TV hosted by Steve Edwards and Connie Chung. In this 1980 piece,
My last two posts have shown Los Angeles in the 1970s, a place enshrouded by smog and filled with traffic. Now lets go back thirty years earlier to the late 1940s and take a nice, slow, boring (but fascinating at the same time) drive around Sherman Oaks, in the San
Apropos of Monday’s post featuring some fascinatingly mundane (yes I just jammed those two words together and did so on purpose) footage of L.A. in the 70s, here’s more of the same but with a tourists touch. We get some nice nasty Freeway shots, a little Sunset Strip, a tad
At some point in 1973 the local Los Angeles television station KTLA (channel 5) sent a camera crew out to gather footage for a now forgotten news segment on gas prices. The crew returned with the above four plus minutes of dailies. Was it ever turned into an actual segment?
Above is a ninety minute feature film made in 1920 called ‘The Flapper’, starring the then sensationally popular actress Olive Thomas. I can’t imagine anyone is actually going to watch the whole movie (I certainly didn’t) so why am I posting it? The film was shot on location in New
It’s not uncommon for yesteryears raciest things to be described in the current day as ‘tame’ or ‘now innocent’. But the 1920s had a lurid, highly sexually charged nature that was far ahead of its time, though it was soon to be quashed by much tamer subsequent decades. Nowhere is