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
Continuing our theme of tough-ass action/noir directors being interviewed by soft, Omelette-making, Napoleon-eating, red-wine guzzling French guys (see yesterday’s Don Siegel interview) here is Sam Fuller describing the making of one of the seminal scenes in his oeuvre–the pickpocketing on the subway moment from ‘Pickup On South Street’ (1953). It’s
Yesterday’s behind the scenes post featured Sidney Lumet directing ‘Dog Day Afternoon’. Today, Sidney is back as we take a look at the making of the catastrophic 1977 musical adaptation of ‘The Wiz’. The film was co-produced by Universal Pictures and Motown Records and starred Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Lena
As a young fellow wandering the streets of New York City in the late 70/early 80s I was always thrilled to stumble upon a movie shoot in progress. Since the New York filmmaking community was quite small then, it was more than likely to be either a Woody Allen or
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ehIgyCJy5Q ‘On With The Show’ (1929) was the first all talking movie in color. Unfortunately the only surviving prints are in black and white, though as you’ll see in the above and below clips, fragments of the color print have somehow survived and been lovingly preserved. Photographed in the two-strip
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIhj_xFKtM4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZc1TdJFAFs Back in 1994 (thirty years ago–Jesus!) I took a few flying lessons from a fellow who taught out of Santa Monica Airport, near where I then lived. I have no idea what spurred this interest, though I later found out that Prozac, which I then took, often results in
On December 16, 1960, two airplanes had collided in midair over Staten Island. One, a United Airlines DC-8 from Chicago heading to Idlewild (now Kennedy) International Airport, smashed into buildings in Sterling Place, just west of Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn . Apparently many thought a bombing occurred. Above
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fURATK5Yt30 Lets kick off the week with a…I’m almost said ‘bang’ but halted myself just in time, preventing a rare lapse in taste on my part. The Hindenburg disaster of 1937 was documented by a number of newsreel companies, with the above British Pathe footage probably being the…I almost said
Here’s another of YouTube artist NASS’s wonderful colorized views of old New York City (with added sound bed of urban atmosphere). This time we are exclusively on Fifth Avenue in midtown. The year is somewhere between 1936-1938 based on the automobiles. The city is unusually clean–the streets literally look polished
This is pretty messed up. I’ve been re-reading James Ellroy’s ‘The Black Dahlia’, the first novel in his L.A. Quartet and one that I haven’t revisited in many years. Thus, it’s fair to say that I am fully immersed in the post WW2 L.A. noir of it all. Now, YouTube