Movies 'Til Dawn BLOG

1926 SUBWAY STIKE

In June 1926 the New York City Subway workers went on strike for higher pay, shutting down the IRT and forcing crowds of New Yorkers to mill about waiting for busses, trolleys and other forms of transportation which were suddenly overloaded with riders who usually used the trains. Strike breakers

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BROADWAY TIME CAPSULE

Thanks to the Fox Movietone sound-on-film technology, we have documentary views of many strange and interesting habitats with the actual sound captured as well. England, India, the Midwest, Long Beach California–all are pictured in the late 20s/early 30s and are available on Youtube. (By the way, my son just pointed

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VETERANS DAY SPECIAL; ‘THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE’

My dear departed father Frank De Felitta (1921-2016) spent much of the 1960s as a writer/producer/director of documentaries at NBC news. I’ve posted them all on Youtube and I highly recommend (natch) taking a look at them. One of the best is ‘The Battle Of The Bulge’, shot in 1963

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WATCHING TV ON 4/1/74

If you were sitting around your house in Los Angeles on the night of April 1st 1974 and had the TV tuned (as it once was said) to KTLA Channel 5, you would have seen the above two minutes of ads. It’s the night before the 46th Academy Awards which

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GRAND CENTRAL IN THE 20s

To compliment yesterday’s posting of old stock footage of the old Pennsylvania Station (scroll down to see–I don’t feel like pasting a link), here’s a minute of stock footage of Grand Central Station in the 1920s. The footage isn’t speed-corrected, the image quality is execrable and the time code window-burn

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PENN STATION – VIEWS OF A DEAD MONUMENT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4a5sAUJ9v4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjg0hK1G2Nchttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1Gm1cCnejM Pennsylvania Station (which connected the biggest railroad in the country to the greatest city in the country after years of New York being accessible only by Ferry after disembarking a Penn train) was built in the first decade of the 20th century and, in an act of monumental vandalism,

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HOLLYWOOD AND HIGHLAND, 1954-ISH

It’s late 1953, early 1954. And somebody with a camera and a professional car mount decided to film a little of Hollywood, USA, for no discernible purpose.  (I suppose it could be a background plate for a shot where the camera is in the backseat, focusing on the backs of

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RIDE ON THE SIXTH AVENUE EL

It’s 1916, see? And we decide to take a ride on the brand new elevated train that travels up Sixth Avenue from the bottom of the Island to 155th. You get me, toots? So you pass your downtown ‘ladies mile’ area, move through midtown (Broadway, land o’ suckers and loafers),

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SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA: THE FIRST INFOMERCIAL

Here’s a twenty or so minute travelogue made in the mid 1950s showing off the Southern California ‘lifestyle’ before that last word was invented. It’s in color, has nice shots of the usual spots and is otherwise unremarkable, though a perfectly pleasant way to waste twenty or so minutes. If

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HARLEM, 1930-ish

Above is a lovely visit to Harlem in the early ’30s (very early, maybe even late ’29 given the fashions on the women specifically). We see a world of pride, fancy clothing, friendly neighborhood deameanor…and perhaps that’s all that British-Pathe, who shot this footage (which includes a very good floor

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