Yesterday’s posting of a TV commercial advertising the 70s swingers club ‘Plato’s Retreat’ has provoked a good deal of controversy in the…oh, I can’t lie. It provoked no controversy whatsoever. And so I will double down with more on the infamous sex club. Above is a 1985 local New York
As I am an hour away from heading to the airport to catch a flight to Los Angeles this seemed to be an appropriate posting. It’s an odd little one minute reel of home movies shot in L.A. (mostly) in 1939 which then, inexplicably, shifts to color footage of old
Here’s a five minute snippet of a longer, quite interesting looking documentary about the great film and theater director Rouben Mamoulian. There are so many things to praise YouTube for but not requiring people to include basic information about the obscure things that they’re posting is hugely unacceptable. The only
Peter Falk’s acceptance speech for his 1972 win for ‘Columbo’ is a delight. Did he write it? I don’t know. I do know that he lived next door to Jack Benny and two doors down from Lucille Ball. And across the street from Ira Gershwin and Rosemary Clooney. And what
Here’s a French documentary about John Cassavetes shot in two parts–in Hollywood in 1966 and in France in 1969. In the first section we see Cassavetes driving along Mulholland Drive to his house on Woodrow Wilson Drive in the Hollywood Hills. (The house will of course be familiar to any
Here’s a drive around Burbank in 1958 shot on 2 inch Quad Videotape. The quality is excellent and the subject matter–a look at the area around NBC–is probably the most glamorous you’ll find in the otherwise arid, desolate and quite frankly depressing wilds of Burbank. A very smart YouTuber–a hell
The Youtube film/video artist named NASS has worked his magic on–get this–Burbank CA. in the 1940s! I’ve posted Nass’s extraordinary videos before–he/she/they specializes in taking old documentary footage of cities and colorizing them, stabilizing and bumping frame rates and adding ambient sound to give you a sense of actually been
Don’t worry, I’m not really going to tell the story of Burbank, CA. For one thing I don’t really know or care about it. But I do like old footage of L.A. And I’ve been revisiting and enjoying old Johnny Carson shows. And yesterday I killed a perfectly good Sunday
Here’s 50 seconds of black and white footage of the ‘Cleopatra’ set, specifically the moment where Liz Taylor is carried down from the Sphinx thingy. It looks awfully scary and shaky but Liz seems sanguine, posed regally and most likely heavily sedated. I have no clue as to how this
Behold a four minute clip of the restored Technicolor ‘Rhapsody In Blue’ sequence from 1930s ‘King Of Jazz’, a gigantic musical revue (they were all the rage in Hollywood at the time) featuring Paul Whiteman and his orchestra. This immaculate restoration shows us for the first time what audiences saw