Movies 'Til Dawn BLOG

I DIG FILM LEADER PT. 2

Apropos of yesterday’s post here is another short (3 minutes) reel compiled of old film leader. This one is particularly cool as it features all kinds of weird graphics and unusual countdowns that I’d never seen before. There is also a slate used as slug from the movie ‘The Time

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I DIG FILM LEADER

Film leader is a length of film attached to the head or tail of a film reel to assist in threading a projector. The leader attached to the head of the reel is called ‘head leader’ (or sometimes simply ‘head’) and a leader attached to the end of the the

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L.A. IN THE 70s

Here’s four minutes of the Los Angeles I grew up in, circa 1975. Perhaps the strangest thing here is the lack of SUV’s on the road. Otherwise it’s pretty much the same LA–bland, ugly and weirdly seductive–that it is today, only quite a bit emptier.

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Vegas, ’47

The Youtuber bluntly known as ‘Vintage Las Vegas’ has posted a very cool 2 minutes of home movie-ish footage of a long dead Las Vegas. Shot in 1947, this is a lush and low-key Vegas, a western outpost, very much Bugsy Siegel’s frontier town. Does any of this even look

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VEGAS 1960

Dig two minutes of home movie footage showing an almost unrecognizable Las Vegas in August of 1960. Or is it actually 1958? I don’t know Vegas well–two of my three trips there were disastrous in multiple ways–but an erudite and Vegas-hip youtube poster–the aptly named ‘Vintage Las Vegas’– offered some

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WILSHIRE BLVD.–8/1/51

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.

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HOLLYWOOD PREMIERS OF 1929

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

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NYC IN THE 1940s

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

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BEVERLY HILLS PROPERTIES OF THE 1950s: AN AL HERD JOINT

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?

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SUNSET STRIP DRAG

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

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