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
Here’s a truly precious piece of footage. It’s a Technicolor screen test featuring Katherine Hepburn playing Joan of Arc. We know from the slate that it was photographed on May 22nd, 1934 on Stage 5 at RKO. The cameraman was Ray Rennahan. No director is listed–did Hepburn self-direct? Evern more
After yesterday’s post on the 3-Strip Technicolor process as demonstrated in the ‘before and after’ reel of scenes from ‘Becky Sharp’, I’ve begun a slow and pleasant dive into a rabbit hole of Technicolor history. Above is a series of ‘color tests’ from 1933-1936 made for Pioneer Pictures, a subsidiary
On March 11th 1927, the Fox Movietone cameras were sent out to Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan to shoot some footage of stylish young flappers traipsing about the area outside of Saks Fifth Avenue, presumably for a newsreel featurette. The surviving footage–just a snippet of what was shot–has been colorized
Having just come from a doctor’s appointment on 31st Street between Park and Madison and thus having spied the lurking grandeur of the Empire State Building on nearby Fifth Avenue, I decided to search out the famously scary photographs of the workmen sauntering around the framework high in the sky
The Youtube artist/film technician named NASS specializes in restoring, colorizing and adding ambient sound to film of cities from the past. The results are extraordinary. (See yesterday’s post for his amazing work on old L.A. footage). Here’s a little under ten minutes of old San Francisco circa early-to-mid 1940s (the
The Youtube artists who calls themselves NASS does extraordinary film restorations, taking documentary footage of street scenes from the past and colorizing, restoring, setting them at 60 frames per second and adding ambient sound. The result is footage of cities from the 1920s, 30′, 40s etc. that looks so real
In honor of the approaching snowstorm in the east (I am tucked securely away in my New York City apartment) I’m posting this fragment of a sleigh-jam in Central Park in 1898. The fat guy who crosses frame at 37 seconds is a cop, no doubt–his self-important gait, while not