https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0N290zPrbAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbNJHQoFxls Here’s how weirdly tuned-in to each other YouTube and I are. Yesterday I posted a short musical variety film featuring a young Jack Benny as the emcee. It got me to thinking about how different Benny’sl later persona was from the brash, unfunny young man in the film. That
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHOmBV4js_Ehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkgbCECWp-s In case you haven’t heard, yesterday was comic legend Mel Brooks’ one-hundred birthday. I’ve been honored to know Mel for the past dozen years and shared a number of delightful Chinese dinners with him and a group of other friends usually at ‘The Manderette’, a now defunct West Hollywood
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1peQ5iagq7shttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoBVNmZS9wI During the early days of World War 2, the phrase ‘Keep ‘Em Flyin’” was used on propoganda posters to encourage voluntary enlistment in the Army Air Corps. So popular was the phrase that it became the title of a 1941 Abbott and Costello vehicle. Above is a strange hybrid
Tonight there’s a screening of my 2010 movie ‘City Island’ at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck, New York. I’ll be there with co-star Julianna Marguilies to do a Q&A after the screening. Since you’re receiving this at roughly the same time the screening is taking place–and since I doubt many of
Let’s end this weeks Fascist deep-dive on a lighter note. Here is “You Nazty Spy”, a 1941 Three Stooges short in which the Stooges are paper-hangers who are weirdly chosen to become the dictators of the fictional country Moronica. Now–the words ‘significant’ and ‘Three Stooges’ aren’t generally uttered in the
‘Cuckoo On A Choo Choo’ (1952) was the 143rd short comedy made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Monday, April 21 through Wednesday, April 23, 1952 and was released on Thursday, December 4th of that year (the 339th day on the Gregorian Calendar). The film
It’s Friday which is Ernie Kovacs time as far as we are concerned. Today I offer up his ‘kitchen symphony’, a fascinating and somewhat disturbing exercise in joining the movements of inanimate kitchen objects with the space-pop music of the master Esquival. The video looks amazing–the actual texture of it,
‘Uncivil Warbirds’ (1946) is the 90th short comedy made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. It was photographed from Friday, August 24th through Tuesday, August 28th, 1945 and was released on Friday, March 29, 1946 (the 88th day of the Gregorian Calendar). This is ‘late’ Curly–after his first stroke
I get that Ernie Kovacs isn’t for everyone–he was often referred to as ‘The Olive’, code for ‘acquired taste’. Actually I have a friend whose taste I usually am in agreement with who once said that Kovacs comedy was for him ‘like being told oatmeal is dessert’. Nonetheless I love
As we began this week with a little Benny Hill from his early, black and white BBC program, let’s end the week with another dose of Benny. (This is a practice known as ‘bookending’. Didn’t know that, did you?) Here is a parody of the then new phenomenon known as