https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiaNQG7HPpc When I was at the Deauville Film Festival in 2010 I was invited to see a live performance of a German orchestra that specialized in playing music of the 1920s and 30s. With great enthusiasm the person who invited me explained that the front man/singer was a perfect replica
I’ve been re-reading ‘Dino; Living High In The Dirty Business Of Dreams’, Nick Tosches’ majestic biography of Dean Martin. Calling it a bio of Dean, however, is reductive in the extreme; the book is a journey through the dark and relentless birth and progression of the American entertainment industry and
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
He’s a very nice few minutes of Peter Falk discussing his fond memories of his friend and collaborator John Cassavetes. Falk is, as always, magnetic–hard to take your eyes off, insightful, articulate etc. Alas, I directed him in 2003 in a forgettable movie called ‘The Thing About My Folks’ and
When I was a young’un growing up in LA in the mid-seventies I was a serious radio-head. I loved all forms of audio entertainment–live radio talk shows, old vintage comedy shows, KJOI (elevator music non-stop) and even the stray TV channel that you could accidentally find on an obscure frequency.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/v-A2EH0vyd4 Sometimes it’s nice to give a blog a month off. Unfortunately, the silence of the past month was an inadvertent one–I’ve been directing the Bernie Madoff mini-series for ABC, an event that normally I would have blogged to death. For reasons that are a bit murky and not really
I am currently working on two documentary films in addition to my feature projects. For the past two years I’ve been shooting interviews of great performers who came out of cabaret and nightclub backgrounds for a documentary on the history of cabaret. The film–titled “Intimate Nights; The Golden Age of
Sorry for the serious lag in updates, posts, entries, what have you. I’ve been on a major writing roll with my new screenplay and have, literally, been too wrung out from writing every day to post. I took today off so here I am. Plus which I have a story
I wish I hadn’t eaten that hat. The Festival du Cinema a la Rio, or whatever the hell they’re called, blew us off. Not the movie–they’re showing that. But it appears that my presence and (Steven Strait’s) wasn’t quite ringing the same bell for them that Andy Garcia’s was. His
Right, then. Salt Lake City. Sundance 2000. The story of selling “Two Family House”. Anybody still care? Anybody reading this? HELLO!!! The guys from USA films were very enthused about the movie and naturally this alerted the other distributors, who showed en masse to our second screening the following night,