https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3AuRaJ86dkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoNdQxkI-0w Above are two of Katherine Hepburn’s no-shows for her Oscar wins (there were four). The first is for ‘Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner’–the award is accepted by her long-time director, pal and landlord George Cukor. It’s not nearly as interesting an event as the second clip, though. In this
I have to assume that the upcoming Harvey Weinstein/Kevin Spacey/James Franco-free Academy Awards ceremony will be packed with well-meaning but uncomfortable to watch speeches about the events of the past four months and perhaps even beyond, stretching back to the day the worlds largest audience ever watched the Presidential Inauguration.
Just as watching ‘Star’ led to visiting Alexander Woolcott’s island retreat (see below), so has that detour led to today’s detour. George S. Kaufman, Broadway craftsman playright/director/theater critic/Algonquin Round Table wit, was one of Woolcott’s regular visitors, cronies, pals, co-sophisticates. In the fifties he took to appearing on network game
Above is a short, pleasant and slightly haunting clip of Rock Hudson discussing ‘Giant’, Elizabeth Taylor and director George Stevens. Hudson was in his mid fifties when this was shot and would shortly be dead of AIDS. He’s awfully genial and his smile and demeanor really do make you want
Here’s my old friend and film school advisor Eddie Dmytryk talking to the same two French guys as in the previous post (scroll down, dammit) for the mysterious TV program ‘Cinema, Cinemas’ (translation: ‘Theater, Theaters’). As always with Eddie, much time is devoted to his infamous blacklisting and subsequent recanting.
Back in the 1980s, cinema journalists Phillippe Garnier and Claude Ventura seem to have created a show consisting of interviews with Hollywood directors (and occasionally actors) that I can only presume was made for French TV. Titled ‘Cinema, Cinemas’ (English translantion: ‘Film, Films’ or, colloquially, ‘Movie, Movies’) the show consists
The year is 1982. I’m a pisher of eighteen or so, intensely interested in and committed to filmmaking, film history, filmmakers etc. And one of the last of the old Hollywood characters to still be at it this late in the game is Dick Brooks (see previous post)–though I hesitate
I’m sitting in my air-conditioned dustbin (aka converted garage) in the back of my house in LA getting ready to write my new screenplay. This is a fearsome prospect for some reason. As a young man, I thought nothing of sitting down, banging out a few scenes, seeing if there
Here is the great Alan Arkin (represented both in the flesh and in portraiture prominently displayed behind him) in the role of acting teacher Michael Malakov, whose class Vince Rizzo (Andy Garcia) attends. In talking with Alan before filming his scenes, I suggested that Malakov might not be a complete
On September Fifth of this year, the filmmaker Edward Dmytryk would have turned one-hundred. (He passed away in 1999). As I mentioned yesterday, this milestone went by–as far as I can tell–virtually unnoticed, unreported and un-cared about by even the hardest-core cinema buffs; and they should care. Dmytryk was virtually one of