In 1980, when I was 16, my father bought an apartment on the Upper East Side in Manhattan and we decamped from Los Angeles to spend the summer there. This was where I discovered two things of major importance in my adolescence. 1) A place where I could buy weed
Here’s a neat little four minute clip reel of 1920s New York City footage, most of it focusing on Times Square at night. The clip selection is random and a bit wonky but anything about 1920s New York City is catnip to me so I’d thought I’d share it. (Apparently
The YouTube artist known as NASS has unleashed a new, wonderful example of his/her/they’s superb work–restoring footage of old urban environments, colorizing them (expertly), adjusting the frame rate and adding a realistic sound bed of background noise. I love these videos and have posted a number of the New York
Here’s another of YouTube artist NASS’s wonderful colorized views of old New York City (with added sound bed of urban atmosphere). This time we are exclusively on Fifth Avenue in midtown. The year is somewhere between 1936-1938 based on the automobiles. The city is unusually clean–the streets literally look polished
Last week (or was it the week before?) I posted an experimental 1929 film called ‘Skyscraper Symphony’ by Robert Florey, which was a paeon to art deco New York and the then startling proliferation of the massive and impressive buildings of the era. On a very different note, avant garde
Here’s a fabulous colorized reel of various views of Broadway in the early 1930s. The YouTube artist known as NASS is responsible for many of these urban re-boot reels, in which he colorizes the footage (with great skill), slows the frame rate down and adds a quite convincing soundbed of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BJQViP16lAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU6fY1wMTd4 Robert Florey is the supreme instance of a professional filmmaker whose dissatisfaction with commercial assignments led him into parallel work as an avant-garde independent. He began his career as a film critic and journalist in the early 1920s and came to some small prominence by making a very cheap
It’s always exciting for me to find glimpses of old New York captured on film at unexpected moments and I’ve got a real find to share with you today. The Florenz Ziegfeld produced 1929 musical movie ‘Glorifying The American Girl’ was filmed at the Astoria Studios in Long Island and
Here’s a very well done made-for-YouTube concoction in which the style/feel/materials of Ziegfeld’s 1927 edition of his legendary ‘Follies’ show is reproduced, using stills, footage culled from various Vitaphone shorts of the era (and other musical films which I can’t identify), all set to a recording of an Ampico Piano
Here’s a remarkable piece of film. It’s the surviving five minutes from an otherwise lost 1933 film called ‘Mr. Broadway’, featuring a very young Ed Sullivan (you can see him in a couple of cutaways sitting at a table with Bert Lahr). The film is essential viewing for any devotee