Here’s a ten minute excerpt reel of John Cassavetes speaking culled from half a dozen different interviews. When he’s younger he looks like Roy Scheider and when he speaks with an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips he is the quintessence of New York-Actors Lab-Beatnik-Mingus-Jazz Clubs-New Wave-Greenwich Village-Paris sidewalk cafe-Sartre
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU2wTGNBehs The magnificent Gena Rowlands passed away last week and in tribute to her I offer the above legendary video which features her husband John Cassavetes, Paul Stewart, Ben Gazzara and Seymour Cassel (sort of–he’s barely seen and doesn’t speak) sitting around a table in a restaurant called ‘The Bull
Readers of this blog are perhaps familiar with my obsessive love for the KTTV Channel 11 logos of the 1970s. KTTV was my go-to home channel for my entire youth, with their schedule heavy on old movies (they had the MGM library), the Ben Hunter Matinee every weekday at noon,
During the 1970’s thru the 1990’s, Jon Byk Advertising created numerous 10 second TV spots, many of them for local Los Angeles businesses. Thanks to their short length, 10 second spots were effective as they could played hundreds of times during the programming day, sometimes saturating a specific hour-long show
If you were a non-driver and attempted to learn to drive by watching old movies, you would be dead or at the very least severely injured from the get-go. In old movies, drivers turn to passengers while driving and deliver monologues to their face instead of watching the road. Or
Yesterday we took a drive down Sunset Blvd. in 1952. Let’s leap backwards twenty years and get some color glimpses of L.A. in 1931. This neat little newsreel is essentially an architectural tour–what else really is there to do in L.A. other than drive around looking at houses?–but at the
Dig this nifty video showing filmed driving footage of Sunset Blvd. in 1952 contrasted with a still image of the same street corner today whenever the car in the earlier footage stops at a light. We can date the old footage from early May, 1952–‘Singin’ in the Rain’ & ‘The
‘Hold That Lion’ (1947) is the 100th short comedy made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Tuesday, January 28 through Friday, January 31 1947 and was released on Thursday, July 17th of that year (the 198th day on the Gregorian Calendar). The film is notable
The brilliant early ’80s iteration of Second City TV, which aired on Saturday’s at midnight on NBC, was–and continues to be– my favorite comedy sketch show, far outshining the SNL of those years (to say nothing of the dead-on-arrival SNL of today). Here’s one of the best of their TV
Continuing this weeks theme of Escargot-eating, croissant-chowing, Gitagne-puffing, Burgundy-swilling French guys interviewing tough-ass directors (see Monday’s Don Siegel post and yesterday’s Sam Fuller post) here is the great writer-director Richard Brooks discussing his adaptation of Truman Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’. Back in the 1980s, cinema journalists Phillippe Garnier and Claude