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
Here’s a wonderful fifteen minute reel of TV commercials from 1965. This is what the world looked and sounded like when I was one year old. It was a world of Ford Mustangs, cigarettes, new pocketbook sized cameras, cleaning products advertised by housewives talking to each other in kitchens and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAG2omxiR-ohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA-KIaNmcE8 The main thing I remember about the children’s toy Lite Brite was that it never worked. Not mine, not my friends, not anyone’s who I knew. The pegs didn’t light up, the back of the thing fell apart easily, the bulbs weren’t even included with the set–which led to
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