Movies 'Til Dawn BLOG

WEEKEND STOOGEFEST

‘Pals and Gals’ (1954) is the 155th short comedy made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It is heavily reliant on footage culled from ‘Out West’ (1947) as well as a Curly entry ‘Goofs And Saddles’ (1937). Thus the only day of photography required to link the various threads

Read More »

HARLEM, 1937 (Ish)

The YouTube artist known as NASS has done it again, giving us another of his superlative restorations of urban footage from the past. His colorization and added sound effects (plus intricate frame rate adjustment) serve to recast documentary footage of the past into the present tense, allowing us to not

Read More »

TOSCANINI; THE BASTARD CONDUCTOR GONE WILD

This one’s a bit difficult to take. Unlike the previous few posts of Bradley Cooper–er, Leonard Bernstein–tussling with his orchestra, this is a recording of Arturo Toscanini berating his orchestra in such foul, angry, loud and insulting ways that I can’t believe they didn’t just get up and abandon the

Read More »

LENNY B. AND THE TRUMPETS; A STANDOFF

Welcome to another clip of Leonard Bernstein in conflict with his orchestral players. This time, during a rehearsal of Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’, he rubs one of the three trumpet players the wrong way when imitating they’re playing in order to describe what he doesn’t like. His imitation is a bit

Read More »

MAESTRO LENNY B. VERSUS DIVA KRISTA LUDWIG

Last Friday I posted a short clip of Leonard Bernstein calling out a student conductor. This of course led YouTube to generate a number of Lenny B. arguments with orchestra personnel all of which are quite delightful (and short). Here’s Lenny tussling with alto Krista Ludwig during a rehearsal for

Read More »

RECORDING ‘COMPANY’

I saw the superb Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ this past Sunday which of course led to a deep Stephen dive on YouTube. Of primary importance in the canon of filmed Stephen stuff is D.A. Pennebaker’s remarkable documentation of the marathon recording session of the original

Read More »

BERLIN, 1927

Enjoy a condensed day/evening in the Berlin of 1927, featuring some awfully well-dressed Menschen, lovely streets and shops, a fine looking Neutrum for luncheon and an evening at a Nachtclub that may well have featured Anita Berber (our subject of Monday’s post which has kicked off this weeks interest in

Read More »

ANITA BERBER: THE DARK MISTRESS OF THE WEIMER REPUBLIC

Behold Anita Berber, a dancer/actress/performer/scandalous provocateuer of the late teens/1920s German cultural landscape. Berber was daring, mad, wildly admired and reviled and died young in 1929 of multiple drug addictions and a general exhaustion of excessive existence. Little of her film work is extant but the above video features two

Read More »

RAYMOND CHANDLER’S LOS ANGELES

Dig this nifty mini-doc (27 packed minutes) that is not about Raymond Chandler per se. It’s about the corrupt doings of Los Angeles in the 1930s and how they inspired and impacted what Chandler wrote about as his mid-life career as a writer was launched (he’d been an executive at

Read More »

NEW YORK 1956 (IN THE COMPANY OF BACH)

See that top video of New York City in 1956? See the video below it of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier Book 2? Roll them both simultaneously (the NYC footage has no sound) and spend a few minutes of your Friday taking a poignant time travel trip to a New York

Read More »

Subscribe for updates

And get a free copy of my book:
"City Island" & "Two Family House" Two Screenplays