Here is one of the most delightful time-travel videos provided by YouTube artist and film-restoration expert NASS, who finds black and white documentary footage of old urban areas, colorizes them, adds a period sound bed of traffic and pedestrian noises and slows the frame rate down slightly, thus giving it
Here is episode five of the wonderful ‘Orson Welles’ Sketchbook’ series, a group of 15 minute monologues he delivered for the BBC in 1955. Here he discusses his infamous ‘War Of The Worlds’ broadcast and even though you’ve probably heard the entire tale before–the accidentally induced mass-panic it caused ask
Here is episode four of the six-part 1955 BBC series ‘Orson Welles’ Sketchbook’. In this fifteen minute monologue OW takes us deftly through a series of unrelated subjects staring with cue cards for actors (‘idiot boards’ as he calls them), Harry Houdini, John Barrymore, more Voodoo. etc. His ‘weave’ is
Here’s episode three of Orson Welles marvelous six-part monologue series ‘Orson Welles’ Sketchbook’, which he made for the BBC in 1955. I posted the first entry in which he recalls his beginnings in the Irish theater on Monday. Yesterday I posted Orson discussing critics and Voodoo. Today the subject is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL3ZoUJ-Tek Yesterday I posted the first of six fifteen-minute TV monologues made by Orson Welles for the BBC in 1955. Today, in a fit of orderliness, I’m posting the second. The subjects at hand in this episode are critics and voodoo and I’ll leave it to OW to spin the
During most of the 1950s Orson Welles was a full-on expatriate, living in various different hotel rooms in various different European capitols, usually paid for by others who often believed they were investing in various Welles projects when in reality they were investing in various meals in various high-end restaurants.
It may seem odd that by far my favorite of Fred Astaire’s dance partners is, in fact, not a dancer at all. But the above clip of Paulette Goddard and Astaire performing “I Ain’t Hep To That Step But I’ll Dig It” from “Second Chorus” (1940) rocks me every time
On Monday I promised to post only Fred Astaire items this week, featuring dancing partners who he only worked with once or twice. Yesterday I broke that promise by not posting anything. (It was a travel day so I’m allowed). Here’s another Fred/Rita number, ‘I’m Old Fashioned’, from ‘You Were
Let’s keep this short (work-wise) and lovely (in every other way) week simple. I’m going to post only Fred Astaire dance numbers all week, specifically ones that might be a bit more obscure to those who mostly know the Ginger Rogers-era Fred. He made two movies with Rita Hayworth–”You’ll Never
I really was going to move onto another female comic this week. But this brilliant Joan Rivers appearance on Johnny Carson from 1979 was calling me from my YouTube offerings this morning and there was simply no way I was not going to share it. I’ve never seen Carson laugh