This past weekend we attended the Rhinebeck Aerodrome, an amazing outdoor (and indoor) display of vintage aircraft, which not only serves as a museum of flight but which also offers an air show consisting of stunt flying of vintage planes by some very very very brave, well trained pilots. As
Here’s a profile of laugh-track maestro/audio engineer Carroll Pratt working his magic on a decidedly unfunny scene from a show called “Webster” in 1983. Pratt added canned laughter to TV shows using a custom ‘laff box’ which he designed and built. He began doing ‘laugh sweetening’ in the late 1950s
The above video provides a neat little (five minutes) history of the laugh track. I agree with all of the points made by the, er, maker and I’d like to write more than these two sentences, but I can’t. You see, I actually did write more but then my word
Yesterday we looked at a scene from an episode of “Friends’ sans laugh track. It revealed itself to be something entirely different than intended–an innocuous sit-com scene with a few laughs instead turned into a Bergman-esque study of faces, mute interactions, intense but silent emotions etc. Today we’ll see what
Laughter is one of our most precious commodities in life, getting us through (and past) difficult situations and topics and providing a release of joy that every day life for the most part lacks. Nobody doesn’t like to laugh. (Except the current leader of the free world who can only
Here’s a fascinating little ten minute audio reel of Frank Sinatra doing multiple takes (six in all) of ‘Pick Yourself Up’ from the ‘Sinatra and Swinging Brass’ album. Neil Hefti’s arrangements are neat and inventive and the band kicks hard. Frank, though, needs a few tries to get things straight–and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jIeUm2KAqYhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlb7WNwcs_I The transition silent stars had to make to sound movies was a treacherous one, the main problem being not that they sounded funny but that their voices didn’t always match their on-screen personas. This could work in two different ways. On the one hand, the voiceless William Powell was
Here’s a wonderful clip of silent screen vamp superstar Theda Bara in 1936, speaking at the end of a Lux Radio Theater presentation of ‘The Thin Man’. Since that movie was directed by W.S. Van Dyke who was known to everyone as ‘Woody’, I assume the person who she’s speaking
Last week I posted about the incredibly strange early silent sex symbol Theda Bara. Since her films are more or less all lost, and her vampiric personality exceptionally strange from the photographs we have of her, it might be something of a surprise to hear that she was, in fact,
Laaving no turn unstoned in our look at various strange cinematic attempts at telling the story of ‘Salome’, here’s a reel of selects from one of the strangest–and most eerily lovely–of all silent films. I speak of the Russian actress Alla Nazimova’s 1923 ‘art’ version of the tale. It isn’t