Dig this nifty video showing filmed driving footage of Sunset Blvd. in 1952 contrasted with a still image of the same street corner today whenever the car in the earlier footage stops at a light. We can date the old footage from early May, 1952–‘Singin’ in the Rain’ & ‘The
Tomorrow, August 3rd, would have been my father Frank De Felitta’s 103rd birthday. (He passed away in 2016, age 94). To honor this milestone of not being alive for eight and a half years, I thought I’d post an exceedingly rare and culturally important documentary he made for CBS television
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ehIgyCJy5Q ‘On With The Show’ (1929) was the first all talking movie in color. Unfortunately the only surviving prints are in black and white, though as you’ll see in the above and below clips, fragments of the color print have somehow survived and been lovingly preserved. Photographed in the two-strip
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIhj_xFKtM4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZc1TdJFAFs Back in 1994 (thirty years ago–Jesus!) I took a few flying lessons from a fellow who taught out of Santa Monica Airport, near where I then lived. I have no idea what spurred this interest, though I later found out that Prozac, which I then took, often results in
On December 16, 1960, two airplanes had collided in midair over Staten Island. One, a United Airlines DC-8 from Chicago heading to Idlewild (now Kennedy) International Airport, smashed into buildings in Sterling Place, just west of Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn . Apparently many thought a bombing occurred. Above
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fURATK5Yt30 Lets kick off the week with a…I’m almost said ‘bang’ but halted myself just in time, preventing a rare lapse in taste on my part. The Hindenburg disaster of 1937 was documented by a number of newsreel companies, with the above British Pathe footage probably being the…I almost said
Here’s a recently ‘unearthed’ (according to the YouTuber who has kindly provided it) promotional film for Las Vegas made in 1955. It’s a remarkable document, not so much for what it includes as for it what it excludes. While extolling the many fun activities tourists can have when visiting the
Here’s another of YouTube artist NASS’s wonderful colorized views of old New York City (with added sound bed of urban atmosphere). This time we are exclusively on Fifth Avenue in midtown. The year is somewhere between 1936-1938 based on the automobiles. The city is unusually clean–the streets literally look polished
This is pretty messed up. I’ve been re-reading James Ellroy’s ‘The Black Dahlia’, the first novel in his L.A. Quartet and one that I haven’t revisited in many years. Thus, it’s fair to say that I am fully immersed in the post WW2 L.A. noir of it all. Now, YouTube
In December, 1929 the above remarkable footage was shot in the Times Square Theater during rehearsals of the Gershwin show ‘Strike Up The Band’. I’ve posted this before but every so often I rewatch it and am freshly amazed at what a rare and peculiar document it is. In it,