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
Here’s a few minutes of grooving black and white footage shot from the rear of a car in Burbank, California in the late 1950s. We are in James Ellroy’s Los Angeles, a dead-ass Valley strip near Warner Brothers filled with places called ‘The Tick Tock Lounge’, ‘The Kings Arms Steakhouse’
My family moved from New York City to Los Angeles in 1969 when I was five years old. The house my parents bought was at the top of Laurel Canyon and Mulholland Drive. In terms of public schools this meant that I was able to go to schools either in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TtERu8NKf8 A few days ago I posted a video of Vincente Minnelli’s abandoned mansion in Beverly Hills. It’s a fascinating and acrid experience to witness the shards of a once worldly and elegant existence. So lets close the week with a more sophisticated and Minelli-esque moment and bring the man
Before you read any further let me quickly give you fair warning that the above posted videos are a complete and total waste of time, lacking in anything remotely akin to cultural interest, intellectual rigor or even pop-culture delight. Still, I find the mid-show plugs that aired in the middle
For many years I would drive by a large, dilapidated house that sits on the corner of Sunset Blvd. and Crescent Drive–the house is angled so as to be literally facing the Beverly Hills Hotel across the street–and wonder why the hell somebody didn’t buy it and fix it up.
Here’s one of those weirdly mesmerizing ‘history of a logo’ videos that are a staple of a complete Youtube diet. This is the history of the 20th Century Fox logo over a 100 year period. I knew that William Fox, an independent film distributor/producer, was the originator of things somehow