Here is an extraordinary find. It’s a forty minute silent doc (no music either–just ghostly silence) detailing the inner workings of the MGM studio lot in 1925. We see images of the lot in its silent heyday, with tours of the exterior, views of the interior stages, lots of groupings
In 1970 James Aubrey, the new and much hated head of MGM, ordered an auction to be held of all of Metro’s old props, costumes and souvenirs of former sets. The event was loudly objected to in Hollywood but in the end the objectors didn’t really make any difference; Debbie
Yesterday I posted a doc on the creation of Century City, which rose atop the rubble of the former 20th Century Fox ‘ranch’ portion of the lot, which was sold in the early 60s to developers to cover the cost overruns on the Fox epic ‘Cleopatra’. A few years later,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od4y5ekYmYQ&list=PLKjjIa7cwTkIqj4eFYjBYkhe5K7v-DaD- What and when was your first exposure to Monty Python? Mine was in early 1975 but it wasn’t the TV show–it hadn’t yet begun to air on PBS yet (at least not on the Southern California affiliate). Nor was it ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ which wouldn’t open
Every day after school in 6th grade I came home and hit the record shelf for the comedy album du jour. Thus far we’ve dipped into two of my favorites, Allan Sherman and the ‘2000 Year Old Man’. But it was Bob Newhart’s ‘Button Down Mind’ and ‘Button Down Mind
I mentioned my love of comedy LPs yesterday and naturally one of the most important ones on my parents shelf was ‘The 2000 Year Old Man’. The genius (I think) of the routine is that if you attempt to explain the mysterious evolution of life it turns out to be
Here’s ‘Fright Night’ (1947), Shemp’s first Stooge short in the Columbia years iteration of the Stooges. It takes a certain kind of low-budget brilliance to make a fight film that doesn’t actually show a boxing match. (Shemp gets batted about the ring a little bit but its inside the gym
Let us close this Greenwich Village obsessed week with a little dancing. This is the magnificent duet between Bob Fosse and the great (and unsung) Tommy Rall from the 1955 musical version of ‘My Sister Eileen’. What has this to do with the Village? Well, the story is set there.
At the peak (or perhaps the depths) of the 1950s 3-D craze, The Three Stooges made two 3-D shorts. One, ‘Spooks’, took place in a haunted house. The other, ‘Pardon My Backfire’, takes place in a garage. Now, a haunted house movie in 3-D makes perfect (if somewhat predictable) sense.
Did you know that Roberto Benigni played Inspector Clouseau in a Pink Panther movie you most likely never heard of? Or that Roger Moore played Clouseau who, it was explained, had undergone extensive plastic surgery to look like Roger Moore? Or that David Niven was brought back for the first