https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmD7jeIEkfg (NOTE: HIT ABOVE ‘PLAY ON YOUTUBE’ BUTTON TO WATCH VIDEO. THE GUY WHO POSTED IT APPARENTLY THINKS HE OWNS IT). When I was a kid in the early 70s getting into jazz and old movies, two great revivals were taking place. One was The Marx Brothers revival, which began
With the introduction of Safety Film in 1925, the home movie craze began. Safety was a non-flammable alternative to the highly inflammatory nitrate stock which all movies previously were shot on. Smaller gauge cameras–16mm arrived two years prior in 1923–were easier to use and didn’t require much in the way
The above short (eight minute) film was made to be shown at General Motors 1956 Motorama show. it purports to show how the future of driving will look twenty years hence and, while it makes the usual inaccurate assumptions about a future that never comes (a la H.G. Welles ‘Things
Here’s some outstanding colorized footage of New York City in 1948-49. (The dates are approximate based on the cars of the period). The YouTube artist known as NASS posted this a few days ago and as always I’m sharing it with you. It’s a remarkable moment of time travel, thanks
‘Fox Movietone Follies of 1929’–sometimes referred to as ” Movietone Follies of 1929 and The William Fox Movietone Follies of 1929–is a lost film. Or is it? Wildly successful upon its release in the spring of 1929–a year of true American madness, peaking that summer and soon to collapse in the fall–the film
Above I’ve posted actual footage of the premiere of Howard Hughe’s 1930 World War 1 aviation epic ‘Hells Angels’. And below I’ve posted a recreation of the event in Martin Scorsese’s brilliant Hughes biopic ‘The Aviator’ (2004–ish). The real event is shockingly huge in scope—just the lit-up sign advertising the
Here’s an astonishing four minute reel of outtakes from ‘Hells Angels’, saved apparently by accident and carefully preserved and lovingly restored. I can’t begin to tell you how rare it is to see outtakes from a film this early–movie outtakes began to be saved in the mid-thirties as a result
Yesterday we began a weeklong look at Howard Hughes’ landmark 1930 World War 1 aerial epic ‘Hells Angels’ by viewing the film’s brilliantly achieved air-born climax. Today we hit the ground with a resounding thud and move from the astoundingly impressive to the astoundingly awful, with a two-part scene set
The saga of Howard Hughes epic World War 1 film ‘Hells Angels’ (1930) has been well documented–if you don’t know it then this Wikipedia entry does a good enough job of giving you the basics. Essentially, the young Texas millionaire/aviator was infatuated with the movies from a young age and
Clearly I’m having a hard time with this being the NFL off-season. So I began today with the above compilation of disastrous football plays of yore and I must admit to feeling much better as a result. (Since it’s the NFL that compiled the clips, they make it unnecessarily hard