I would bet that most people reading this blog know that W.C. Fields was a Broadway headliner prior to his emergence as a Hollywood superstar. Furthermore, many readers might also know that he had a long career in Vaudeville before that. What one might possibly not be aware of, though,
‘Dizzy Pilots’ (1943) is the seventy-fourth two-reel comedy made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Tuesday, April 6th through Friday, April 9th 1943 and released on Friday, September 24th of that year. The central gag of the film–one of their strangest and most inventive–involves Moe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjX16FwJezM Here’s another of the George Mann home movie items, this one of W.C. Fields clowning around in front of his house in Great Neck, Long Island. The year is 1928. Though Fields is a Broadway star, his move to California and his eventual international stardom from his movies is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A11EWc2_WJQhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qYmFXWtdo8 Yesterday I posted about the amazing George Mann home movie footage of Broadway in the late 1920s. Mann performed in a number of Earl Carroll reviews during that decade and in 1928 he was part of the seventh edition of ‘Earl Carroll’s Vanities’ along with W.C. Fields. Although Fields
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C_sYUQl7xM ‘Oily To Bed, Oily To Rise’ (1939) is the forty-second short film made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Thursday, March 16th through Monday, March 20th, 1939 and released on Monday, October 6th of that year. Make sure to pause and crank up the
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjV5U7W8X6E On Wednesday I posted two of Michael Cimino’s mid-1960s commercials which I’d sought out while reading Charles Elton’s fine new biography of Cimino. But it occurred to me that I’d never (except for his ‘Deer Hunter’ Oscar acceptance speech) heard him interviewed. And then I turned up the above,
Before directing ‘The Deer Hunter’ and ‘Heaven’s Gate’, Michael Cimino was a highly successful director of hip and groovy 1960s television commercials. Although he technically was part of an all-in-one advertising/production house called Madison Pollack and O’Hare (MPO), he apparently was always a step outside of the group, marching to
Here’s a real deep YouTube discovery. It’s a twenty minute chunk of mostly raw footage from a 1970 television doc called ‘Billy Wilder’ showing Wilder in the process of directing a movie. The making of the doc coincided with Wilder’s presence in Europe shooting ‘The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes’,
‘Three Little Sew and Sews’ (1939) was the thirty-sixth short subject made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Monday, March 21st through Thursday, March 24th 1938 and was released on Monday, January 9th 1939. It is a peak Curly Howard-era short featuring some of Curly’s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E81cTpcmkYohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=op0NY8Fc5GY ‘Love Is All Around’, the much loved theme from ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’, was written by Sonny Curtis who also wrote ‘I Fought The Law’, made famous by Bobby Fuller. If the difference between Mary and Bobby Fuller seems like a stark one then try this on for