Movies 'Til Dawn BLOG

THE GARDEN OF ALLAH UNDER GLASS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5SbtV6zGpI Apropos of last week’s post about the legendary Hollywood hotel/lodge/bungalow village ‘The Garden Of Allah’, here’s a look at the beautiful model of the place that resided in the Lytton Savings Bank on the site where the GOA stood before being demolished in 1959. I remember seeing this model

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THE GARDEN OF ALLAH–A MOVIE AND A MODEL?

The famous West Hollywood bungalow court ‘The Garden Of Allah’ was on the corner of Sunset Blvd. and Crescent Heights in West Hollywood and was host to all kinds of east coast Hollywood transplants for well over thirty years (specializing in alcoholic self-loathing Broadway playwrights and their ilk). Click here

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TIMES SQUARE–THE COLORED 60s

See yesterday’s post for some excellent home movie coverage of the Times Square of the 1960s. And see today’s for basically the same thing but colorized. Actually the above home movies focus more on buildings than people–and while the buildings were more interesting to tourists then, it’s the people that

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TIMES SQUARE, 4/8/66

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

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WEST HOLLYWOOD, 1980; THE ‘GAY GHETTO’

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,

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NO SMOG, NO CARS, LOS ANGELES

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

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MORE SMOG, MORE 70s, MORE L.A.

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

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GAS, SMOG, CARS, L.A.

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?

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BURBANK CONFIDENTIAL’: CRUISING THE VALLEY IN LATE ’59

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’

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HOLLYWOOD IN THE 70s

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

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