Here’s a few minutes of ghostly, black and white silent footage of the area around Broadway and 88th/89th streets in 1971. Nothing of any interest happens–which is what makes it oddly fascinating (to me at least). The everydayness of this portrait gives it an unintended weight–it achieves gravitas through its
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zk0eyKzp1c Here’s another of these fabulous old urban footage updates, this one supplied by the Youtube artist known as GuyJones. It features random street scenes of London in the swinging year of 1967. As always the added ambient sound helps immeasurably in bringing the footage to life and placing us
Above are excerpts from the BBC Arena program, “The Peter Sellers Story”, a documentary directed by Peter Lydon featuring Seller’s home movies shot with his portable cameras. These excerpts covers the year when Sellers became famous in the US and the time he spent with Stanley Kubrick, making “Lolita” and
Listen to the most charming and amusing guest you can imagine (on TV, at a dinner party, anywhere), the great David Niven, as he recalls the director Edmund Goulding’s funeral. Goulding directed a young Niven (he gives Goulding credit for his first screen test) in the 1938 remake of ‘The
I had no idea the above existed. It’s a dropped number from ‘The Bandwagon’ called ‘Two Faced Woman’ featuring Cyd. This is especially surprising given the fact that ‘The Bandwagon’ is far and away my favorite movie musical (I can’t remember who said this but I heartily concur: “Singing In
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