At the University of South Carolina there is a collection of Fox Movietone Newsreels. It contains seven million feet of nitrate motion picture film and four million feet of safety motion picture film documenting the national and global politics and culture from 1919 through 1934 and from September 1942 through August 1944. Within the collection are elements from two distinct newsreel products. One is a silent newsreel, Fox News, which ran from 1919 into 1930. The other is the original sound newsreel, Fox Movietone News, which ran from 1927 through 1963. Unlike other newsreel series (‘The March Of Time’ for instance), the early Fox sound newsreels didn’t just show silent footage of events overlaid with narration. Uaing a unique sound-on-film technique wherein a camera crew could shoot film with the sound being recorded directly onto the film without a whole sound rig needing to be set up, Fox Movietown was able to go out with a small, mobile crew and photograph most any event with relative ease, capturing the actual sounds of the moment. Thus we have not only film of events of the day but the live on-location sounds of the people in them. Yes, the sound quality is rough and probably never sounded particularly good. But that’s one of the charms of these antique views of the world. Above is a clip from the ‘entertainment’ section of a newsreel featuring Fanny Brice singing the then new hit song ‘I’ve Got A Feeling I’m Falling’, with music by Fats Waller, lyrics by Harry Link and (supposedly) Billy Rose. Brice and Rose are pictured on a Manhattan rooftop on a sunny but somewhat windy day along with a bevy of chorus girls who aren’t allowed to perform. Rose stands by, admiringly watching Brice (to whom he was married) and Fanny gives us some of her Yiddish-accented comedy stylings. I say ‘supposedly’ when speaking of Rose’s contribution since Rose was the songs publisher and it was typical at the time for publishers to force the actual writers of the song to accept them as co-credited authors. The publishers then received royalties as writers as well as publishers and the songwriters–who were often, like Waller, black–got their songs published. This invaluable piece of film turns up in Woody Allen’s ‘Zelig’, with Leonard Zelig pictured standing amongst the group, nodding happily as Brice sings ‘Mr. Zelig stand by…cause I’ve Got A Feeling I’m Falling’…