Here’s Mel Brooks, age 91, on an English chat show telling the story of showing Alfred Hitchcock the finished version of ‘High Anxiety’. I love Mel’s reaction to dopey Russell Brand–his face clearly reads: ‘who is this prick and what am I doing sharing a show with him?’
Over the past week or two I’ve been posting the amazing ‘home movie’ footage shot by eccentric dancer and enthusiastic amateur photographer George Mann of various stars he worked with on Broadway (click here for the great W.C. Fields footage from 1928). Apparently Mr. Mann went to Hollywood in 1928
My longtime love/hate affair with Jerry Lewis has entered a new phase; the one in which I’m discovering talents of his that were–ready for this?–subtle and skillful. These are not words often associated with Joey Levitch but check out his dancing in the above clip from ‘Rock-A-Bye Baby’, a 1958
‘Squareheads of The Round Table’ was the 106th short comedy made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Monday, December 9th through Thursday, December 12, 1946 and released on Thursday, March 4, 1948, fifteen months after its making. The reasons for this are buried (one might
Yesterday I posted a late 1960s Volkswagen TV ad featuring a young (and very funny) Dustin Hoffman. Apparently, fifteen or so years later, Hoffman remembered the ease with which he’d picked up a few shekels by pimping himself out for a car he would never drive and put the word
The VW Fastback Sedan–a car you simply never see on the road anymore–received a big boost when newly famous star of ‘The Graduate’ Dustin Hoffman became the car’s key pitchman. Hoffman is still so close to his ‘Graduate’ persona that watching the commercial makes it seem like Benjamin Braddock found
W.C. Fields last home in Los Angeles was in a Hollywood neighborhood called Laughlin Park. The neighborhood is close to the hills of Los Feliz and gated for privacy. The house was for sale last year and a rather nice video was made showing the joint off. The house was
I would bet that most people reading this blog know that W.C. Fields was a Broadway headliner prior to his emergence as a Hollywood superstar. Furthermore, many readers might also know that he had a long career in Vaudeville before that. What one might possibly not be aware of, though,
‘Dizzy Pilots’ (1943) is the seventy-fourth two-reel comedy made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Tuesday, April 6th through Friday, April 9th 1943 and released on Friday, September 24th of that year. The central gag of the film–one of their strangest and most inventive–involves Moe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjX16FwJezM Here’s another of the George Mann home movie items, this one of W.C. Fields clowning around in front of his house in Great Neck, Long Island. The year is 1928. Though Fields is a Broadway star, his move to California and his eventual international stardom from his movies is