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=vb_HyDvUcGAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TrpjKelALc When I was a kid I was deeply involved with playing ragtime and stride piano, having learned how to do it by putting my fingers on our player piano while a roll played and seeing where the keys depressed and how the whole business of two-handed jazz piano worked.
If you’ve never been told the deeply emotional and truly profound story of the birth, success and death of the junk food Los Angeles stop ‘Pup N’ Taco’ then look no further. The above mini-doc lays out the whole sordid tale. Actually Pup ‘N Taco served excellent chili dogs to
Here’s another brilliant SCTV sketch from their early 80s network show, featuring a production of ‘Death of A Salesman’ starring Ricardo Montalban, Margaret Hamilton, George Carlin and DeForrest Kelly, with a special appearance by John Belushi. Rick Moranis’s wonderfully cruel spoof of Carlin in this period reminds us that Carlin
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlZZgPxR3Bkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBc4AHxnHOc I thought it might be a nice way to kick off the week with a little Joey Heatherton number from the mid-1960s dance show ‘Hullabaloo’. In this clip she sings a new song celebrating the new dance known as–what else?–the ‘Huallabaloo’. But wait. Is this really a new song