https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG0rnd-m3CU Here is a fascinating travelogue reel showing Hollywood and environs in 1928 (not 1929 as the YouTube poster has labeled it). I date it as late summer/early winter ’28 as the two movies we see advertised, ‘Four Rooms’ and ‘The Man Who Laughs’, were released in August and November
I often post the videos of the YouTube artist known as NASS, who specializes in colorizing old urban documentary footage, slowing the frame rate down to make them feel more realistic and adding an appropriate bed of sound. Here’s one that I somehow missed–it was posted a year ago. We
Not many people realize that sound film existed well before the advent of ‘The Jazz Singer’ in 1927 and one of the pioneers of early experimental sound film was of course Thomas Edison. In 1913, the Edison Company made talking pictures using a sound-on-cylinder system called The Kinetophone. These pioneering
Today I offer two views of this week’s subject Gloria Swanson in the late 1920s/early 1930s. Above is a little reel that jams together a few obscure but interesting snippets of film–it’s a bit of a hodgepodge but I thought worth including in our loose and free-wheeling survey of La
Continuing our little remembrance of the world’s first official crooner, above is a nice profile of Rudy Vallee done for the Today Show by Boyd Matson in the early 80s. Bryant Gumble was then the host and appears—pre-face lift–at the end of the segment. There’s nothing terribly fresh in this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Kubz9fYTTc My readership (both of you) has no doubt been wondering where I’ve been the past week. (Or perhaps they’ve been relieved of the task of watching those daily videos that jam up their inbox every night). The answer is: Ireland and London. The reason cannot be divulged at this
Here’s a neat little four minute clip reel of 1920s New York City footage, most of it focusing on Times Square at night. The clip selection is random and a bit wonky but anything about 1920s New York City is catnip to me so I’d thought I’d share it. (Apparently
The YouTube artist known as NASS has unleashed a new, wonderful example of his/her/they’s superb work–restoring footage of old urban environments, colorizing them (expertly), adjusting the frame rate and adding a realistic sound bed of background noise. I love these videos and have posted a number of the New York
If you were a non-driver and attempted to learn to drive by watching old movies, you would be dead or at the very least severely injured from the get-go. In old movies, drivers turn to passengers while driving and deliver monologues to their face instead of watching the road. Or
Yesterday we took a drive down Sunset Blvd. in 1952. Let’s leap backwards twenty years and get some color glimpses of L.A. in 1931. This neat little newsreel is essentially an architectural tour–what else really is there to do in L.A. other than drive around looking at houses?–but at the