Several years ago I produced and hosted a podcast featuring conversations between me and many legendary filmmakers. Among the guests were Mel Brooks, Andy Garcia, Peter Bogdanovich, Randal Kleiser, John Sayles, Mary Harron, John Avildsen…you get the idea. I stopped doing it because, frankly, I ran out of people I
At the peak of the Marx Brothers revival of the late 60s–mid 70s, an LP consisting of snippets of Marx Brothers routines was released and became my favorite record of all time…at least during the summer of 1974. The record is narrated by Garry Owens, an announcer who was a
As many of you cinema-geek sorts probably know, the original ending of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’ was a pie fight that broke out in the war room. There are different reasons given for why it was cut–the above five minute doc claims the studio was nervous because Kennedy had just
Here’s a lovely clip from a 1970-ish Dick Cavett show featuring an interview with Orson Welles. Here, Welles trots out a few anecdotes that are popular in his repetoire but still delightful to hear from the great man himself. And trying to separate fact from fiction with Welles is always
Did you know David Mamet–playwright, screenwriter, director, essayist, loudmouth conservative pundit–was also an aviator? Apparently he learned to fly in his 60s and continues to do so now, in his 70s. Above is a nice little video of him discussing southern Califormia’s role in the history of flight as well
I recently re-watched an excellent, not-too-well-known noir from 1955 called ‘The Big Combo’. It was directed by Joseph Lewis who most film buffs know as the man who directed the famous one-take bank robbery sequence in the 1949 noir ‘Gun Crazy’. In ‘Big Combo’, Lewis takes his limitations–it’s clearly a
Did you know that actor/director/restauranteur/sailor/guy who-co-produced ‘The Sting’ Tony Bill was a serious pilot and aviation history buff? A master pilot and aerobatics flyer, he’s owned and flown an envy-producing bunch of vintage hangar-candy among which are a 1946 Globe Swift, a 1935 Aeronica Chief, a 1929 Parks P-2A bi-plane,
There are many words that come to mind when watching the above Betty Boop cartoon from 1934, ‘Betty In Blunderland’. They include surreal, nightmarish, demented, outlandish and, most importantly, fascinating. The Fleischer brothers approach to animation was madly untethered to anything resembling reality. Plot doesn’t exist, though ‘Alice In Wonderland’
Yesterday I posted an astoundingly cool video of Shari Lewis dancing up a storm on a 1964 TV variety show. It was a side of her I never knew, having grown up knowing her as a ventriloquist and nothing more. Here she is a few years earlier doing what we
Did you know that comedienne/puppeteer Shari Lewis was also a kick-ass dancer? I didn’t. Apparently, when Captain Kangaroo was looking the other way, Shari was busy dancing up a storm in secret. In 1964 she appeared on an unidentified TV variety show (I believe it’s ‘Broadway Tonight’ based on a