Here is a most peculiar piece of footage (and short–only 28 seconds) showing a garden party at Francis Ford Coppola’s Napa Vally home sometime in the mid 1970s. We see Francis quaffing white wine in a plastic cup, George Lucas picking his teeth, Dennis Hopper bedecked in cowboy duds and
To finish off this weeks Marilyn M. expedition, let’s view this very short but very interesting clip of film from the abortive ‘Somethings Got To Give’ shoot. It’s a brief moment just after the shot’s been slated but before Cukor has said ‘action’ (or ‘camera’ as was his habit) in
Here’s a 1950 screen test of Marilyn for a movie that apparently was never made called ‘Cold Shoulder’. The actor she’s testing with appears to be Richard Conte which leads me to believe the film was a Fox production. When I hear ‘screen test’ I usually think of a one-take
Marilyn Monroe is quicksand. Once you step into the topic it soon controls and consumes you. Witness my mention of her house Monday–meant to be a one-off blog entry–and the weeds into which I wade as I focus on the last months of her life. While living at the Helena
Yesterday we looked at some creepy silent footage shot the morning of Marilyn Monroe’s death at her house in Brentwood. Today we look at some equally creepy footage–but creepy for an entirely different reason. Apparently the house was offered up for sale in 2010 but for whatever reason didn’t sell–it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtXlX7uAlCQ I’m reading James Ellroy’s magnificent new novel ‘The Enchanters’, much of which has to do with the still mysterious death of Marilyn Monroe. Most of the Monroe material thus far (I’m halfway through) revolves around her house in Brentwood, where she was discovered dead of an overdose of barbituates
The ‘Niagra Falls/Slowly I Turn’ bit–which we’ve been examining this week in excruciating detail–found a variation of sorts in this Abbott and Costello routine from ‘Keep ‘Em Flying’, a 1942 wartime vehicle co-starring Martha Raye as twins. (Click the above link–the person who posted the video declined to share it
Here’s some gorgeously colorized footage of lower Broadway and the surrounding environs at the beginning of the last century. Unlike the colorized footage of the city in 1947 that I posted last week, this includes the black and white version of the same footage–it comes after the colorized stuff finishes
Here’s another marvelous view of a now very vanished New York City, courtesy of the YouTube artist known as NASS. The city is seen in color (via colorization–it was originally shot in black and white) with an added soundbed of city noise, which somehow works wonder in terms of bringing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOtgigQp_nshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PJ4KUFynlk Yesterday I posted two clips of Roger Williams, the most successful of the so-called ‘easy listening’ pianists of the 1950, 60s and beyond. But before Williams came several other influential and ground-breaking pianists in this highly specialized and often unfairly derided field of music. Chief among them was Carmen