Here is SCTV’s ‘Ricardo Montalban School of Fine Acting’. (The inclusion of ‘fine’ is very important, in an SCTV-ish kind of way). Every piece of this skit kills me but none so much as Joe Flaherty playing Terry Malloy as played by Ricardo Montalban. Oh, and Gene Shalit learning to
In Elia Kazan’s1989 autobiography he reflects toward the end of the book on the pain of failure and missed opportunity in show-biz. Of course he manages to work Orson Welles into the story, bemoaning the lost promise blah blah blah.Then he bitchily references a tale of Welles keeping a whole
There are very few Sidney Lumet movies I haven’t seen–and that’s saying a lot since he made so many movies. One is something called ‘Lovin’ Molly’ which he squeezed in between ‘Serpico’ and “Murder On The Orient Express’. (In his book ‘Making Movies’ he mentions in passing that he did
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adSl_tRzrEQ In tribute to Catherine O’Hara (and in memory of John Candy, Harold Ramis and Joe Flahrerty) here is an SCTV parody of the Samuel Z. Arkoff women-in-prison genre ‘Broads Behind Bars’. Every second of this sketch is brilliant, targeted satire. They even get the low-rent look right. Just in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHOmBV4js_Ehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EMfA5_tm8Y My go-to cartoon characters as a kid were Bugs/Daffy/Porgy (Warner Brothers) and Charlie Brown/Lucy/Snoopy/Linus Charles M. Schultz). Everything else was the bunk. I’ve written before–rather recently in fact–about my loathing for all things Disney. Ditto Hanna-Barbara and their cheap, flat animation which did nothing to enhance their cheap, flat
Here’s a clip of the majestic comedy duo Bob and Ray (Elliot and Goulding were their surnames) from what appears to be a mid 1970s Johnny Carson show. I can’t explain the condition of Johnny’s jacket in the intro but it doesn’t really matter. This is one of my favorite
Here’s two hours of unidentified, unknown and un-listened to music from the 60s/70s that I urge you to put on in the background. It will gradually bring peace and a smile to your face and you’ll find your worries disappearing and your work habits improving. Indeed, it serves the same
I always enjoy discovering period industrial films explaining then cutting-edge technologies–how to process Technicolor film, how to record and press 78 RPM records etc. Above I’ve posted a 1937 mini-doc explaining the process by which a radio show transmits from the studio to homes across the country. It’s quite niftily
The LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin, one of the most magnificent non-rigid airships (aka ‘Dirigible’ or ‘blimps’) ever produced, made an appearance over New York City at the completion of its twenty-one day round-the-world flight (which was sponsored by William Randolph Hearst) on August 29, 1929. The city stopped in its tracks,
When I was a kid I taught myself to play piano by using the odd, ancient first-digital-music-delivery-system- ever thing known as a piano roll. Simply put, piano rolls are a rolled sheet of paper with cuts in it representing individual notes which, when run through what is known as a