Behold this delightful reel of home movies shot in Times Square on the above date. Theaters are showing Dean Martin as Matt Helm in ‘The Silencers’, Paul Newman as ‘Harper’ and the supposedly worst movie ever made (it isn’t but it’s pretty lousy) ‘The Oscar’ is proudly in its first–and
Let’s close this week of 1970s Los Angeles heritage with this quite interesting news segment focusing on the then newly out gay community of West Hollywood. ‘Two on the Town,” was a local Los Angeles series broadcast by KCBS-TV hosted by Steve Edwards and Connie Chung. In this 1980 piece,
My last two posts have shown Los Angeles in the 1970s, a place enshrouded by smog and filled with traffic. Now lets go back thirty years earlier to the late 1940s and take a nice, slow, boring (but fascinating at the same time) drive around Sherman Oaks, in the San
Apropos of Monday’s post featuring some fascinatingly mundane (yes I just jammed those two words together and did so on purpose) footage of L.A. in the 70s, here’s more of the same but with a tourists touch. We get some nice nasty Freeway shots, a little Sunset Strip, a tad
At some point in 1973 the local Los Angeles television station KTLA (channel 5) sent a camera crew out to gather footage for a now forgotten news segment on gas prices. The crew returned with the above four plus minutes of dailies. Was it ever turned into an actual segment?
Here’s a few minutes of grooving black and white footage shot from the rear of a car in Burbank, California in the late 1950s. We are in James Ellroy’s Los Angeles, a dead-ass Valley strip near Warner Brothers filled with places called ‘The Tick Tock Lounge’, ‘The Kings Arms Steakhouse’
My family moved from New York City to Los Angeles in 1969 when I was five years old. The house my parents bought was at the top of Laurel Canyon and Mulholland Drive. In terms of public schools this meant that I was able to go to schools either in
All week we’ve been dancing around the first ‘Crime of the Century’, the 1924 murder of a youth named Bobby Franks by two wealthy Chicago teenagers. So let’s end things with a nice, crisp History Channel doc on the crime. Aside from those dreadful ‘reenactment’ shots using non-speaking (and therefore
On a rainy day in 1929, the Fox Movietone people mounted a camera on top of a truck and–with police escort (you can hear the plaintive wail of the siren throughout this video)–took a drive down Broadway. Bumpy though the ride proved to be, it captured a mesmerizing look at
Above I’ve posted a real weirdie. It’s stock footage of West 52nd street shot sometime in the early 1930s. It has no discernible point or reason for existence. Unlike normal stock, there is little that is simply caught. Rather it is mostly staged shots of restaurant and speakeasy tasks–a guy