Movies 'Til Dawn Blog

RAYMOND CHANDLER’S LOS ANGELES

Dig this nifty mini-doc (27 packed minutes) that is not about Raymond Chandler per se. It’s about the corrupt doings of Los Angeles in the 1930s and how they inspired and impacted what Chandler wrote about as his mid-life career as a writer was launched (he’d been an executive at

Read More »

HOLLYWOOD: BURTON HOLMES VISITS THE STARS

Yesterday I posted about Burton Holmes, travel guru and the inventor of the ‘travelogue’–movies showing the public exotic lands that they could never hope to travel too. The post shows views of Hollywood in the early 1930s, by then Holmes adopted home base. Above is another reel of Hollywood-based Holmes

Read More »

TO LIVE AND DIE (AND WATCH COMMERCIALS) IN L.A.

Nothing transports me back in time to my childhood quite as much as watching old local TV commercials and station I.D.’s. This is clearly the result of spending way too much time staring at the tube as a kid but what the hell–it was back in the days before children

Read More »

LAUREL & HARDY-FEST DAY 5: ‘THE FINISHING TOUCH’

I was surprised to read in Randy Skervedt’s excellent book ‘Laurel & Hardy–The Magic Behind The Movies’ that ‘The Finishing Touch’ (1928) was considered something of a disappointment in its day–Stan Laurel, a notoriously discerning craftsman, apparently felt that it could have been much better. Five years later some of

Read More »

LAUREL & HARDY-FEST DAY 3: ‘BIG BUSINESS’

Today’s tour of Culver City in the 1920s also includes the silent L&H classic ‘Big Business’. Shot in 1929, the classic short gives us charming views of the slow-to-be-built Cheviot Hills/Culver City adjacent area, with many empty lots and a few houses under construction that can be seen in the

Read More »

NORTH AND SOUTH IN MID-CENTURY CALIFORNIA

The YouTube artist (and I mean artist) known as NASS has posted another of their awesome videos showing old footage of a city cleaned up, remastered, with frame rate adjusted and a creative soundbed added. The result is a virtual time machine, a mesmerizing look into the past using footage

Read More »

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA TIME MACHINE–THE 1940s

The YouTube genius NASS (I’ve posted his/her/their videos before) has once again worked his/her/their magic on some old footage of a city from the past, in this case Los Angeles in the 1940s. Much of it appears to me to be stock footage most likely shot by a studio crew

Read More »

Subscribe for updates

And get a free copy of my book:
"City Island" & "Two Family House" Two Screenplays

Twitter

Twitter feed is not available at the moment.