Dig the above footage of a remarkably clean and spiffy WIlshire Blvd. shot on the above date. We’re in mid-city and will pass by a number of landmarks, chief among them the Art Deco May Company building which has finally been refurbished and is now the newly opened Academy Museum.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exuUHrGg770 Dig the above footage, courtesy of UCLA Film and Television Archive, of two movie premieres that took place in the calendar year of 1929, ‘The Divine Lady’ and ‘Broadway Melody’. The latter was MGM’s first major talkie–it won the Best Picture Oscar though in retrospect I think most current
A Youtube artist (and I mean ARTIST) named NASS specializes in taking old documentary footage of New York City and Los Angeles and revitalizing them (footage shot, for the most part, to serve as rear-projection plates for movies–you know, the backgrounds of driving scenes where you can tell the actors
Here’s a real weirdie. Back in the 1950s a real estate broker named Al Herd, who apparently specialized in Beverly Hills properties, made a promotional film consisting of shots of him showing two very 50s-esque youngish ladies various houses he was representing. Or was the film actually ever really made?
Take a little spin down the Sunset Strip in 1964, courtesy of the above clip. While the uniformly low buildings of the time have now given way in many cases to mega-hotels, there are still quite a few recognizable ones. My family moved to LA four years after this and
Take a stroll through Times Square on a typical evening in 1931 by watching this extraordinary footage that was shot for God knows what reason. It’s date is mislabeled as 1929–the films playing in the theaters that are seen include ‘Dance Fools Dance’, ‘The Front Page’, ‘Trader Horn’ , ‘My
Why was the fascinating footage posted above shot? Hard to say, but I’m glad it was. It consists of three fragments of documentary street footage photographed at three different locations on 5th Avenue in 1929. In the first, two women enter the middle of a crowd (many of whom are
Dig this: there’s a Youtuber who has a channel called ‘Soft Tempo Lounge’ which features music videos (for want of a better term) he/she have created using footage culled from various 60s-era sources–found footage, commercials, repurposed feature films etc. that are set to music by Euro-pop artists of the time.
Ever wonder what James Finlayson looked like off-screen, sans mustache? No? Well, so what? Part of the wonderful few minutes of home movie footage from the early 30s (posted above) is taken at Stan Laurel’s daughter Lois’s second birthday party. Both Finlayson and Ollie were present and it’s quite charming
This vivid, color film reel of various New York City locales in 1939 is, sadly, something of a mystery as the person who posted it on Youtube declined to comment on it or allow comments (due to racist sentiments apparently). Still, it’s quite a find. In three minutes we get