Here’s an interview with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy that I’ve never seen before–perhaps it was recently unearthed since the relatively small amount of interview stuff with them available has long been well known to all serious L&H fans. It’s part of either a newsreel or TV short program called
Here’s a nice little clip of Peter Bogdanovich discussing ‘The Third Man’, Carol Reed and Orson Welles. I was honored to be friends with Peter for twenty years and always loved his impressions of people. Here he ‘does’ Orson Welles talking about how great the role of Harry Lime was
Did you know that Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s perfect screenplay for ‘The Apartment’ was written on the fly while the film was being shot? Can this actually be true? According to Shirley MacLaine, in the above very interesting doc about the making of the film, Wilder started filming with
It’s been said that MGM was where comedy went to die. Certainly that was the case with the Marx Brothers, whose final three MGM films were all abject unfunny failures. ‘Our Gang’ also suffered an ignominious end, morphing into a group of do-gooder kids who were eager to put on
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idw8JLe_r_8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osOG_8JZy_g Carole Lombard died tragically in an air accident on January 16, 1942, just over one month after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She was returning from an enormously successful war bonds tour– she was in the vanguard of Hollywood stars helping to raise money for the war effort–and the
This little mini-doc appears to be a 1965 travelogue of the Austran city Salzburg, birthplace and home of Mozart. In fact, they bury the lead and about three minutes in it’s revealed to be a behind-the-scenes look at the filming of ‘The Sound Of Music.’ Charmian Carr, who played Liesl
Lets wrap up the week with the best five minutes of your day (or perhaps week). Here’s a compendium of Buster Keaton’s most extraordinary stunts, all of which are done practically (i.e.no special effects), all of them by him (i.e. no stunt doubles) and some of them truly death-defying. That
Here’s a most enjoyable pre-code item that I’d never heard of called ‘Air Hostess’ (1933), starring Evalyn Knapp and James Murray. Knapp was a popular actress of the day with two deficits; she couldn’t act, and she didn’t know how to spell her first name. But the real stars of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBn8cuks8s4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyA__0GJqhs&t=23s Here are two different short documentaries on the making of ‘Breakfast Of Tiffany’s’ that, when taken together, add up to a larger story of what making movies is (or can be) like. In the top one, the female A.I. voice tells us in no uncertain terms that the making
Here’s a short and very lovely reel of Paris in the 1930s. The colorization is quite good and serves, as always when married to old verite footage, to remind us that people and places looked an awful lot like they do now–with colors, skin tones and all the stuff that