Yesterday I posted a fascinating short doc about the daunting creation of an animated film in 1938. Having seen my recent interest in the subject, YouTube quickly coughed up the above video about the methods by which characters in early cartoons went from being rigid stick figures and achieved human-style
This short doc from 1938 shows us the unbelievably intricate, detailed and tedious process used in crafting an animated picture in the era before Hanna-Barbara ruined animation with their cheap, non-moving backrounds and unrealistic body motions. ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ is the subject at hand and I can’t
Here’s an interview with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy that I’ve never seen before–perhaps it was recently unearthed since the relatively small amount of interview stuff with them available has long been well known to all serious L&H fans. It’s part of either a newsreel or TV short program called
Here’s a nice little clip of Peter Bogdanovich discussing ‘The Third Man’, Carol Reed and Orson Welles. I was honored to be friends with Peter for twenty years and always loved his impressions of people. Here he ‘does’ Orson Welles talking about how great the role of Harry Lime was
Did you know that Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s perfect screenplay for ‘The Apartment’ was written on the fly while the film was being shot? Can this actually be true? According to Shirley MacLaine, in the above very interesting doc about the making of the film, Wilder started filming with
It’s been said that MGM was where comedy went to die. Certainly that was the case with the Marx Brothers, whose final three MGM films were all abject unfunny failures. ‘Our Gang’ also suffered an ignominious end, morphing into a group of do-gooder kids who were eager to put on
Here’s another brilliant SCTV sketch from their early 80s network show, featuring a production of ‘Death of A Salesman’ starring Ricardo Montalban, Margaret Hamilton, George Carlin and DeForrest Kelly, with a special appearance by John Belushi. Rick Moranis’s wonderfully cruel spoof of Carlin in this period reminds us that Carlin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idw8JLe_r_8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osOG_8JZy_g Carole Lombard died tragically in an air accident on January 16, 1942, just over one month after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She was returning from an enormously successful war bonds tour– she was in the vanguard of Hollywood stars helping to raise money for the war effort–and the
This little mini-doc appears to be a 1965 travelogue of the Austran city Salzburg, birthplace and home of Mozart. In fact, they bury the lead and about three minutes in it’s revealed to be a behind-the-scenes look at the filming of ‘The Sound Of Music.’ Charmian Carr, who played Liesl
Lets wrap up the week with the best five minutes of your day (or perhaps week). Here’s a compendium of Buster Keaton’s most extraordinary stunts, all of which are done practically (i.e.no special effects), all of them by him (i.e. no stunt doubles) and some of them truly death-defying. That