Here’s a terrific sampling of the 1975 Jerry Lewis MDA telethon, featuring a good deal of Sinatra, some Totie Fields, a little Harry James and some of Jerry’s greasiest, most self-serving moments. This extended highlights reel is best played in the background while you do something better with your time,
To those of us of a certain age, Labor Day weekend will always belong to the Jerry Lewis MDA telethon. Jerry was at his most Buddy Love-ish when hosting the show, strutting around in a tux, his hair heavily pomaded, a cigarette clutched between his fingers. He often dressed down
Orson Wells once said that “raising money is my profession, making movies is my hobby” and sadly he spoke the truth. Whenever I feel frustrated by the amount of time it takes to get a movie made, and bemoan how many seemingly inactive years a filmmaker piles up, I re-examine
The YouTube artist known as NASS has unleashed a new, wonderful example of his/her/they’s superb work–restoring footage of old urban environments, colorizing them (expertly), adjusting the frame rate and adding a realistic sound bed of background noise. I love these videos and have posted a number of the New York
Apropos of our focus on John Cassavetes this week, above is the trailer for his 1968 film ‘Faces’. I have no idea if he cut or approved this trailer but it does an excellent job of whetting the appetite for seeing the film. Removing the audio and playing the images
Here’s a ten minute excerpt reel of John Cassavetes speaking culled from half a dozen different interviews. When he’s younger he looks like Roy Scheider and when he speaks with an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips he is the quintessence of New York-Actors Lab-Beatnik-Mingus-Jazz Clubs-New Wave-Greenwich Village-Paris sidewalk cafe-Sartre
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU2wTGNBehs The magnificent Gena Rowlands passed away last week and in tribute to her I offer the above legendary video which features her husband John Cassavetes, Paul Stewart, Ben Gazzara and Seymour Cassel (sort of–he’s barely seen and doesn’t speak) sitting around a table in a restaurant called ‘The Bull
Readers of this blog are perhaps familiar with my obsessive love for the KTTV Channel 11 logos of the 1970s. KTTV was my go-to home channel for my entire youth, with their schedule heavy on old movies (they had the MGM library), the Ben Hunter Matinee every weekday at noon,
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
Yesterday we took a drive down Sunset Blvd. in 1952. Let’s leap backwards twenty years and get some color glimpses of L.A. in 1931. This neat little newsreel is essentially an architectural tour–what else really is there to do in L.A. other than drive around looking at houses?–but at the