Here’s a nice little video essay on Leonard Bernstein’s apartment in the Dakota, on Central Park West and 72nd Street. It features mostly stills of the large, tall and crowded rooms (stuffed with furniture and artifacts), though there is also a little doc live-action stuff thrown in. The apartment was
Here’s a terrific clip of the Nicholas Brothers from ‘Orchestra Wives’ (1942) performing ‘I’ve Got A Gal From Kalamazoo’. Unfortunately the first minute and a half of this precious routine is wasted by having the brothers sing (or should I say lip-sync) the entire song. Hiring the Nicholas Brothers to
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15BAagfdZ8c In our final Glenn Gould post of the week (see previous three if you dare) we find the young piano whiz taking a walk down 57th street in his trademark garb, carry his funny little folded up piano chair that his father made for him and heading for the
Below is part 4 of 4 of an essay I wrote on director George Stevens in 2011. Click here for part one, here for part two and here for part three. Last week was Stevens 119th birthday. I had a plan: to work our way through “Shane”, my favorite Stevens
The below is part two of a four part essay I wrote on director George Stevens (‘A Place In The Sun’, ‘Shane’, ‘Giant’) in April, 2011. Yesterday would have been Stevens 119th birthday. I’ll be posting the rest of the essay throughout this week. Click here to read part one
Tough guy actor George Raft began his career in the cabarets of Times Square in the 1920s as a ‘hoofer’, period slang for a male dancer who didn’t specialize in formal dance. Hoofers were a breed unto themselves, generally self-taught street-wise kids whose athleticism and panache could land them in
Apropos of the doc about the making of Billy Wilder and I.A.L Diamond’s ‘Fedora’ (1978) which I posted last Friday, here’s another doc about the making of Wilder’s much more robust and well-known film ‘Some Like It Hot’ (1959) titled “Nobody’s Perfect’. Scholars of Wilder and Marilyn Monroe will hear
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUqnSedqssI Much is being jabbered about A.I. and its likely calamitous effect on the creative/filmmaking/writing and even acting process. There’s little reason to worry in my opinion; A.I. is hear to stay and will soon supplant the methods by which movies have been made for one-hundred plus years. And in
Continuing our story of ‘Annie Hall’ and its Oscars moment, above is a short section from a doc about Woody (don’t know which one) which tells the oft-repeated tale of how he blew off the ceremony and didn’t even know the movie had won the major Oscars of that year
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBLUKjrdH3M The director William Friedkin, who died in August of this year, was not one to mince words. He was volatile, sometimes crude, always controversial and extremely refreshing in a bracing sort of way. For time and space reasons I won’t go into his many quotable comments but I urge