I’m sitting in my air-conditioned dustbin (aka converted garage) in the back of my house in LA getting ready to write my new screenplay. This is a fearsome prospect for some reason. As a young man, I thought nothing of sitting down, banging out a few scenes, seeing if there
As a convention, the credit sequence is as old as the hills. Movies used to open with a formal presentation of the credits of the major stars and major technical help (cameraman, costumes, sets, editor, music) responsible for the movie you were about to see. Over the years, though, styles
The critic and historian, Martin Gottfried, in his excellent biography of the demonic Broadway producer Jed Harris, notes that the 1920’s were “times of floridity, of vamps with panthers on leashes, of Rudolph Valentino and Bela Lugosi…in the 1920’s it was not so odd to view and even live
On September Fifth of this year, the filmmaker Edward Dmytryk would have turned one-hundred. (He passed away in 1999). As I mentioned yesterday, this milestone went by–as far as I can tell–virtually unnoticed, unreported and un-cared about by even the hardest-core cinema buffs; and they should care. Dmytryk was virtually one of
DAY ONE OF THE PRODUCTION PROPER. Today it all took off. And Dan ‘modified’ a Ford (see below) which as ceremonious as it may well have been for Raymond to whack a sledge hammer into the grill of a beautiful car, we need his health to be in a good
And so on the brink of the first day of filming in the Rizzo house, as all crew members grasp on to the last precious moments of the weekend, we finalise our cast profiles. And boy are we going out with a bang with the smoldering yet fresh Dominik Garcia-Lorido.
Continuing on our unplanned but highly appropriate month long birthday tribute to Orson Welles, I’ve discovered two clips of an interview conducted with the big dog in 1960. Clearly this is a part of longer interview–on IMDB the film is known as “Interview With Orson Welles” (gee, they really put their
Having just returned from the sixty-first annual Cannes Film Festival where, like many others, I had my hand out looking for money for my newest film (hence the paucity of posts this month–begging is a full time gig), I decided to look for some vintage Cannes material on youtube hoping
Happy birthday, Orson Welles. Tuesday, assuming you’d not only outlived the actuarials but had quit the food, the booze, the cigars and taken up yoga and lost two hundred pounds, you would have turned ninety-three. I’m sure wherever you currently reside, you regret none of it. I have four…”cultural heroes”
One of the tenets of this weblog, since it’s immortal inception last summer, was to find various things of interest that were popping up on youtube and link them–historically, anecdotally–giving some shape to the wonderful montage of archival material available now on the web. Oftentimes this is relatively easy: pick