Get this: Not only will "Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story" premiere at the TFF, it will be released day-and-date by Tribeca Films. In other words, we have a distributor--and a very fine one at that. Day-and-date means that the movie will be available on multiple platforms simultanously. You can see it, download it, stream it, I-tunes it, Amazon it etc. all as it premieres at the film festival. It will also play theatrically in New York and Los Angeles in order to qualify it for next awards season.
One of the reasons I'm so happy about Tribeca becoming our partner in the film goes back a good number of years. In the early '90's, when I was just starting out, the very first deal I ever made was to develop my movie "Cafe Society" with HBO. We looked around for a good producer to team with and wound up with Tribeca Films--then fairly new on the block. Jane Rosenthal and Robert De Niro were to have been my first feature filmmaking partners--which in turn led to my visiting the set of "A Bronx Tale" which was then shooting in Brooklyn, of course. Alas, things didn't work out with HBO and I wound up making the movie independently (and with another set of producers--and therein lies a tale...wait a minute, I already blogged about that a few months ago). Nonetheless Tribeca and all it's associated with--films, festivals, restaurants--continues to remain a wonderfully positive element in my life.
It's official. My new documentary, "Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story", will premiere this April at the Tribeca Film Festival in good old New York City. This is the same festival that preemed (as they say in VarietySpeak) my recent feature "City Island", which wound up taking the festival's coveted Audience Award (and which came with a cash prize...a cash prize! Do you dig it?)
I couldn't be happier with TFF as the venue for this very personal film, which centers on the appearance of a black waiter named Booker Wright in a documentary made by my father, Frank De Felitta, in the mid 1960's. That film, "Mississippi: A Self-Portrait" was an brutally honest look at the town of Greenwood Mississippi during the heated struggles of the civil rights era. Booker, who was employed as a waiter at a "whites only" restaurant, looked right down the barrel of the NBC news cameras and--in a startlingly provocative and emotional speech--described the truth about what it was like to be a black servant to the white "planter" class.
The fallout for Booker was extreme. After the film aired on NBC, he was beaten so severely by a white police officer that he had to be hospitalized. His store (he ran his own cafe on the black side of town) was vandalized. And a few years later he was murdered. Though the culprit was caught, tried and imprisoned for life (he was a young black man), the case against him is murky and unconvincing. Booker Wright's murder is a big question mark to me and we raise the possibility in my film that it was probably related to his controversial appearance in my father's film.
Welcome to "Booker's Place", a movie about a time and place and way of life that no longer exists. Or does it? Some traveling music, from the great (and neglected) Barbeque Bob...
In the late 1940's, Billy Wilder was involved with two projects having to do with Sunset Blvd. Yes, yes, one was the movie--which takes place in a 1920's Spanish Mansion at 10036 Sunset Blvd. (this is the address William Holden gives to Nancy Olsen at the end when he invites her over to witness his real--er--situation). (By the way, the house in the movie was located nowhere near that address--it was, in fact, situated on the unlikely corner of Wilshire Blvd. and Western Ave, and was owned by a former wife of J. Paul Getty--if that's your idea of a good time). The other Wilder/Sunset Blvd. project also involved a house--one that he commissioned Charles and Ray Eames to build for him on a three acre parcel of land located at Sunset and Foothill Drive in Beverly Hills.
Exactly when the house was commissioned and for what reason it was never built remain something of a mystery. But read this excellent Architectural Digest piece to know more about the house itself. "A House For Billy Wilder", as the Eames--in a fit of mad whimsy--named their design, is a mostly glass affair of 4600 square feet that appears to sit in the middle of the three acre site that Wilder had purchased. The article plays up Wilder's then brand-new union with his second wife, the jazzy/classy/sharp- as-a-fresh-cut-diamond Audrey Wilder (still with us in that same apartment I wrote about a few months ago) as the inspiration of the house. It was Wilder's turn for the mid-life-change-of-house-decor-wife phase of life and this house was to personify the then 44 year old directors "new look". Only before things got underway, according to the article, Audrey Wilder nixed the whole project on account of their being too much glass in the house to keep clean.
This seems plausible until you read it back to yourself a few times and realize how little sense it makes. Who would be cleaning the glass--her? And how often do people with houses with walls of glass need to get them cleaned anyway? The big question for me having to do with the Eames's design has to do with Wilder's legendary and rapidly growing art collection. Where does it go? There a smattering of wall space, but not nearly enough to display the entire booty. And lovely as it to imagine the above house alight in the Beverly Hills nightime with works by Picasso and Braque and Matisse and Calder and Chagall a-glowing from within, it does feel a little...exposed. Doesn't it? Even if surrounded by high hedged walls and gates, the glass house as a display case for a modern art collection has me worried. I suppose I would agree with the Wilder's and go for the twenty-four-hour-security-building-on-Wilshire option.
But there's another story about this "house that never was" lurking out there that I find intriguing enough to waste your and my time with. (It won't take long). It involves the first Mrs. Wilder--a woman named Judith Badner (who was mother to Wilder's only child) and a show-biz journalist named Maurice Zolotow. It goes like this:
Back in the 1970's, before Cameron Crowe made it cool for everybody to like Billy Wilder again, Billy Wilder was a once-revered now in eclipse filmmaker, walking the streets of Beverly Hills, malacca cane in hand, playing the part of a still energetic moviemaker waiting quasi-patiently for the world to rediscover him. Indeed there was something of the Norma Desmond about the 70's era Wilder--with his natty blazers and Fedoras, his vintage Mercedes, his art-filled penthouse and provocative yarns of Hollywood's yesteryears, he was defiantly--almost proudly--out of touch. "We didn't need words, we had faces then", intones Norma. Whereas Wilder might have said: "We didn't need faces, we had words then". (I was recently reminded of a delightful example of the Wilderian way with words from his and Brackett's "Ninotchka" script: Melyvn Douglas suggests going out. Garbo says it's too late--"it's twelve o'clock." "No," purrs Douglas, "it's midnight.") Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond were still in there pitching--but if the project didn't have Lemmon and Matthau attached then it seemed unlikely to get made.
Then one day an old acquaintance knocks on his door--show-biz journalist Maurice Zolotow, a guy who'd been writing about Broadway and Hollywood personalities since the '40's and had several quite enjoyable books to his credit. (My favorite is an early collection of profiles called "There's No People Like Show People"). Zolotow is a true believer and sees in Wilder a fascinating biographical subject--a living history of Hollywood as well as a singular personality and artist. He proposes a book on Wilder's life. Wilder agrees. And soon, apparently, things begin to go wrong. In the finished book, "Billy Wilder in Hollywood" (published in 1977) Zolotow writes about how difficult Wilder's barbed attacks were for him to withstand.
"He said I had no feeling for a gag. Every time I tried to report one of his gags, I ruined the punch line. He just took me apart right there in the his office. He took me apart culturally and as a human being. I finally said, "Billy, when I leave here, the way I feel, I think I"m going to drive my car over a cliff and kill myself." "Aaagh," he said leering at me, "you make my mouth water."
Twenty some years later, Wilder had his own point of view about what was going on with his erstwhile friend/biographer. As he told Cameron Crowe:
"Well, when you saw him (Zolotow) he was so haggard you wanted to cry. He was in AA. He wanted to make a drunk out of me. No way I can drink more than two martinis. I don't know, I just threw him out of the office after the first two weeks. Then he came back. But fortunately very few people read it, and once they read it, they didn't believe it because I'm not like this...I just didn't want to have that book around me. I just hated it."
In Zolotow's defense, I must say that it was the first book I read on Wilder and that it made the unusual nature of this fascinating man come quite alive to this particular adolescent. It also made me look at the world in the way that he describes Wilder looking at it--Wilder saw art in all things, from paintings to razors to ashtrays to sculpture to furniture to NFL football to how to properly mix oil and vinegar and salt and apply it to a fresh piece of bread.
Now what has all this to do with the Eames house? Well, Zolotow writes a moving chapter about Wilder's first marriage, speaking of how he and Judith--a strikingly elegant, sophisticated dame--grew apart during the war years:
"When they met and fell in love, Judith had been a woman with an eye for fashion and a love of exterior and interior decoration. But now...all these aspects of high living were empty. She had been shaken by the war. While the war had made Billy conscious of life's slender thread so that he clung more intensely to sensual joys, she began seeking new values, different roads."
One of the areas of disagreement in the marriage had to do with where they lived. Their house was located at the top of Coldwater Canyon in an area known as Hidden Valley. Although no longer considered remote by any standards, in the 1940's it was something of an outpost--a dusty, distant canyon area filled with ranches, gardens, ducks (I suppose) and all that. Judith liked it--she seems to have been turning into something of an early "organimaniac". Wilder disliked it--it was too far from the Beverly Hills cafe society haunts that he always preferred. The Eames house, according to Zolotow, was conceived as a potential solution to the faltering marriage.
"He (Wilder) bought three acres on Sunset Boulevard and Foothill Drive. It was an unbelievable parcel of the the best land in one of the best neighborhoods in the country. It was large enough so Judith could have her gardens. And yet he would be near his friends and parties... only the house was never built."
The Wilder's divorced in 1947. By then they'd moved from Hidden Valley to a house in the flats of Beverly Hills (704 North Beverly--if you must know...) and Judith decamped with their eight year old daughter for Brooklyn Heights, New York. (To raise money for Ukrainian immigrants perhaps?) Wilder had met Audrey Young several years earlier when she appeared as a bit player in "The Lost Weekend". They married in 1949. And that's when the Eames house project seems to have been revived. Why, though? Perhaps it was a case of salvaging a good project that had been developed for faulty reasons and in the bargain reinvigorating it with fresh purpose--in this case Wilder's new marriage to the woman who would remain the love of his life.
Only once Audrey got a load of all that glass, all bets were off. Really?
Do we believe the much younger than her new husband Audrey--a former big-band singer and occasional actress--was really all that tough and sophisticated? Or underneath the veneer was she a bit wide-eyed and perhaps miserably aware that she was trying to fill some very big shoes? Indeed, was Audrey's worldly predecessor--the stylish and unknowably remote Judith--a tad too similar to the unseen heroine of a non-Wilder film, in this case Hitchcock's "Rebecca"?
And would this have made the unbuilt (but planned for Judith) Eames house a mid-century Mandalay? Even if it remained only an enticing set of plans? Do we buy the "too much windex" story or do we go with the "rid all memories of the previous wife" story? Am I being too obvious? One of my favorite Wilder aphorisms is: "In movies everything must be obvious." To which a collaborator responded: "But Billy, what about subtleties?" "Make the subtleties obvious also", barked Wilder.
In any case the house was never built and a few years later the Wilder's decamped to their charmingly modest apartment digs. But here's a strange thing: though Wilder sold off two acres of the lot, he kept one acre and left it vacant and untended. And it was the one that fronted right on Sunset Blvd. I remember passing by it for many years as a kid, wondering why in the midst of lush B.H. there was a single weed-choked lot. Perhaps retaining the last remains of the "house that never was" was Wilder's way of retaining the last memory of the union that couldn't last. And he made sure to keep the parcel that could" be easily seen by him every time he drove down Sunset Boulevard.
Apparently the editorial department at Warner Brothers prepared a blooper reel every year, most likely for showing at the no doubt drunk and disorderly Christmas party. I rather enjoy the 1949 edition (posted below) for the simple fact that it provides an interesting window on slang and sexual innuendo at the time. A large number of the dropped lines are followed by the exclamation "nuts!" as opposed to the usual "Goddam!" Was this the year of "nuts"? Additionally there are a number of jokes (not really bloopers so much as put-on moments) involving actresses aggressively putting the moves on actors--a new sexually liberated/woman on toppish kind of wind in the air following the spirit of post-war hoopla perhaps? David Niven and the baby is pretty good as is crusty old Lionel Barrymore in a bloop from "Key Largo". And I rather enjoy Danny Kaye's intentional cut-ups--he seems, somewhat like Peter Sellers (see previous post) to need to provoke unplanned laughter in order to get into the mood to provoke planned laughter. More to come...
What are bloopers? Mistakes made by performers or public figures which shatter the illusion that they're attempting to create thereby reminding the audience that all acting and most speechmaking is just bullshit. Usually bloopers involve actors simply forgetting their lines (and then muttering "Goddamit"). Sometimes people simply fall down or become frustrated with an uncooperative prop. And sometimes uncontrollable laughter erupts in a performer for no apparent reason. This last is a very specific form of blooping and it's referred to by the English as "corpsing". I'm not quite sure why the reference to a dead body, but I've heard English actors describe it thusly: it's the moment when two actors staring at each other in mid-scene suddenly realize the absurdity of what they're doing--pretending to be other people and sincerely spouting sentiments which have no true meaning to them outside of the scene.
Peter Sellers was a master of the "corpse" and in some of his outtakes one gets the feeling that he's actually self-inducing the corpse moment as a way of releasing some tension within himself. Viz:
And then there are the good old fashioned line screw-ups (followed by the usual expletive). Here's a reel of that genre of blooper, apparently compiled from Universal films of the 1940's. The only performers I recognize are Robert Cummings, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Elisha Cook, Jr. Does anyone else out there recognize the others?
There's "Kane". There's "Bicycle Thief". "Greed" of course (though who the hell has ever really seen it?) "Rules Of the Game", "La Dolce Vita", "Wild Strawberries" and I suppose a few more too famous to mention. On and on--ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Face it, the GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIMES LIST has largely remained the same over the past fifty years. Stuffy, academic and proper as a maiden aunt. So why don't we shake the tree a bit and introduce a few new concepts?
Let's begin with the fact that filmed storytelling generally needs to be incredibly functional to be incredibly satisfying. Why this is true is a mystery. The musical play is somewhat the same--fat has no place in this art form, or if it does it's strictly for fatheads. Digressions, diversions, excursions--you can do them, and a few people will appreciate the effort (or pretend to) but in the end we are dealing with bread and circuses. Hold your audience, surprise and move them, top your best emotional moments and/or gags and you've got a great film. Or at least one that people will enjoy and watch more than once--which, in a gloriously down-and-dirty economically based medium like film, is what truly counts.
My vote for the tightest, best executed, most enjoyable demonstration of the above theory follows. Frame by frame, inch by inch, I find this film as satisfying, enjoyable and moving an adventure as any of the above named masterpieces. I hearby go on record and nominate, as an utterly worthy and deserving addition to the pantheon...
The notorious Bettie Page, one of the great pin-up/peep-show queens of all times, disappeared from view in 1957. For years her whereabouts were a total mystery. Eventually she was "sighted" but she categorically refused to be photographed or interviewed. Then, for some reason, in 1996 she decided to give an interview (audio only) to Tim Estiloz, a skilled, journeyman broadcaster/critic. Why she decided to finally re-emerge (and why she chose the relatively low-key forum Estiloz offered) remain a mystery. But emerge she did.
The interview is a nice summation of the first part of her life but doesn't go into the quite tragic second part of her life--schizophrenia, depression and a murder attempt (she had a violent altercation with her then landlord involving a knife...take that, Irving Klaw!) Page's refusal to be photographed is disappointing at first--but maybe she has a point. "Who wants to see a model when she's old and broken down", rasps the seventy-three year old Bettie. "I hate old age!" Hearing her voice--an oddly accented mid-to-southern growl--quite makes up for it.
Lets cut it to the bone: Blaze Starr was the goddamdest stripper of them all. She was one hot mama and apparently is still alive and well and working as a gemologist. Why I find this so cool I don't know; it's a little like learning that cigarettes are actually good for you I guess.
Starr, in her heyday (or hey-hey-hey-day!) was so smoking that the Governor of Lousiana, Earl Long, carried on a torrid, illicit affiar with her that was public knowlege. (I know that sounds like a contradiction but in the fifties and sixties people were still able to have publicly acknowledged illicit affairs--look at Kennedy and Monroe, for Chrissakes). Long's affair with the buxom Ms. Starr actually landed him in a mental hospital shortly before his death in 1960. He left her fifty grand in his will which she refused to take. Their relationship was dramatized (but not immortalized) in the desultory screen bio "Blaze", starring Paul Newman and Lolita Davidovich,--in my opinion, one of the great lost opportunities of the biopic genre.
It's not just Starr's "expansive upper regional domes" --as Charles Chaplin, writing in his autobiography with the unusual title "My Autobiography" referred to Joan Barry's physique (she who landed him in court on a bogus rape charge in the mid forties shortly before his marriage to the underage Oona O'Neil and the ultimate refusal of his Visa for Communistic tendencies etc. etc. enough!) that make Starr so tantalizing a subject. Watch this very nice black and white mid-1950's view of Starr through to the end. Somewhere after the four minute mark (it runs five and change) you'll see what I mean. I won't give it away. Suffice to say that if you believe in reincarnation, you probably will want to come back to life as a piece of furniture once used in a short film of a stripper named Blaze Starr, who in her heyday was so smoking that the Governor of Louisiana...
Here's a rare clip of Nicholas Ray (I will not insult anyone's film-telligence by listing credits...such as "Johnny Guitar", "Rebel Without a Cause", "Wind Across the Everglades", "They Live By Night", "On Dangerous Ground", "The Lusty Men", "Flying Lethernecks", "Born To Be Bad", "Run For Cover", :"King Of Kings", "55 Days at Peking"--wait--is that all of them?") discussing the ending of the astonishing 1950 Hollywood noir "In A Lonely Place". He briefly mentions how he was seperated at the time from his wife, the film's co-star Gloria Grahame, but he doesn't mention why.
Courtesy of Leonard Edit (a pseudonym, natch) here is a fine artiwiki on the Burlesque Hall of Fame--a place that actually exists in (where else?) Las Vegas. Burlesque is considered the venue in which the striptease was born and flourished and, on the show-biz food chain it was generally considered to be at the bottom. The term itself implied lewdness, coarseness, a cheap laugh and an even cheaper set of thrills to be had watching a woman almost take off her clothes. Burlesque patrons were generally lowlifes who'd wandered in off the street to get out of the cold, a racing form tucked under their arm, reeking of cheap Gin and Old Golds. One didn't set out to be a Burlesque performer--it was a fate that befell you after a series of bad breaks in better venues. Yesterdays Vaudeville headliner could become today's low Burlesque comic simply due to a few bad breaks (like bombing in Peoria...or giving the Syph to an underage girl who turned out to be the daughter of the mayor of the town you were playing). Strippers, likewise, were girls who probably aspired to the chorus line of a Broadway show but either didn't have the stuff or didn't sleep with the right producer--this being back in the day when the theater was still largely a heterosexual domain.
And yet art did flourish within that arid soil. Over the years, the striptease became progressively more sophisticated and gradually crawled out of the Burlesque house and onto the nightclub stage. Gypsy Rose Lee was at the forefront of the transformation of the stripper into the "exotic dancer"--or "Ecdysiast", a word she actually commissioned from H.L Mencken in order to have a more dignified way to refer to her profession. (The etymology of ecdysiast is from "ecdysis"--meaning "to molt". Fine. But what's the etymology of etymology?) And molt they did in increasingly exotic and amusing ways as we'll see below.
First stop: for a very entertaining explanation of the art of stripping, here's the "You Gotta Have A Gimmick" number from the unfortunately lousy 1962 movie version of "Gypsy". This clip also provides a probably more accurate than you'd expect look at the backstage manners found in your average crapped-out Burlesque house.
Next we come to the hysterical Georgia Sothern. Warning: there is nothing--and I mean NOTHING--erotically appealing about this woman's act. But it's weirdly funny and oddly mesmerizing so give it a chance. For more on Georgia--a lot more--dig this link.
Next is the lovely Chinese Burlesque artist Noel Toy and her fan dance. For more on Noel, here's her quite fascinating obit. Hep it, digcats:
Apropos of my previous post, which was last years last post (as if it matters) which managed to feature the combined talents of director Robert Altman, composer/actor/producer/Julie London-marry-er Booby Troup and Striptease icon Lily St. Cry, I thought I'd begin the year's descent into the "eleysian fields of popular entertainment" (a phrase deployed by Albert Lewin writing to Preston Sturges about a script called "Two Bad Hats" which became "The Lady Eve" as quoted in Hendersons "Five Screenplays by Preston Sturges) with a festive celebration of strippers from the past. Jesus, what a train wreck of an opening sentence. Read backwards, it makes more sense than read forwards.
What would the world do without the stripper? They're usually young, friendly and claim to be studying journalism at Columbia University (at least the ones I've met). The history of the "Strip" is one of the more fascinating sideshow exhibits in the show-biz museum and I'm sorry but I don't have time today to get into it. Instead I'll refer you to my friend, J. Fred Wikipedia, who has provided us with a marvelous illustrated article on the subject.
Let's begin the new year with a refreshing look at this often misunderstood art form. I hearby commence the "Festival Of Strippers" with one of the art forms quintessential practitioners, Gypsy Rose Lee and arguably the art forms greatest guest-host, Rita Hayworth. Below are clips of each of them performing the same song, Doris Fischer and Allan Roberts classic jive-tease "Put The Blame On Mame". Gypsy's performance is from a TV appearence in the late fifties and includes a brief glimpse of the great vibraphonist Red Norvo, whose group is accompanying her. What I find truly interesting in this clip is how relatively mild--indeed almost lackadaisical--Gypsy's routine actually is. True, she's older than your usual stripper and this was presumably a cleaned-up version for broadcasting purposes--but is this really what all the fuss was about? As for her voice, let's just say that Natalie Wood's intentionally nervous rendering of Gypsy's debut as a stripper was positively complimentary; Gypsy doesn't really have a voice. Nonetheless, it's the real live Gypsy.
And then there's Rita Hayworth, from the 1946 semi-noir "Gilda". This clip will speak for itself. Though Hayworth wasn't a stripper and as far as i know really only ever performed a striptease this once, she managed to understand the art form and its audience in a way that nobody else ever quite did. Enjoy...
In the 1960's, filmmaking great Robert Altman ("Mash", "Nashville", "O.C. and Stiggs"--do I really need to go on?) was going through a rough patch. Though not many of his "Mash" and all-things-forward fans knew it, Altman had been around a long time--and not in a groovy, counter-culture kind of way. His career was that of a jobbing television director--from the late fifties through the sixties, Altman directed scores of episodes of shows like "Bonanza", "Combat", "The Roaring Twenties", "Kraft Mystery Theater" and many too undistinguished to mention (all right--"Hawaiian Eye"). Always looking to make the leap into features--and already being left behind by contemporaries like Sydney Pollack, Elliot Silverstein and Mark Rydell--Altman became increasingly fractious with his employers. Always a sharp-tounged provocateur, his drinking brought out a dark edge that frequently torpedoed friendships and business relationships. Result:fewer television assignments for Altman. Meanwhile, his feature projects were not gaining momentum.
So what did Altman do? In a sense, he became an independent filmmaker at a time when being such a thing was not a choice--or even really a category. Lou Lombardo, his longtime editor, once remarked that Altman needed to shoot film like others need blood--it allowed him to live. Looking for any opportunity to keep working, Altman somehow hooked up with a video jukebox outfit called Color-Sonics for whom he made a handful of shorts. The films were, essentially, the first music videos--interesting and amusing visuals designed to accompany popular songs, viewable for a couple of quarters by peering into a jukebox equipped with a window that displayed the screen. I have no idea of how these jukes really worked--could there have been projection equipment inside the juke itself?--and I wonder if there are any of these machines lying around somewhere. (Actually there must be a weird convention of people who collect and restore the damn things that meets once a year somewhere in Nebraska...or LA).
Anyway, posted below are two of the several Color-Sonics that Altman directed--one featuring singer-actor Bobby Troup, the other starring striptease artists Lily St. Cyr. Many thanks to Marc Myers of Jazz Wax for unearthing the Bobby Troup "Girl Talk" video (for lack of a better word), thus energizing me to search for the Lily St. Cyr.
Both films display an admirably free cinematic verve--they are not, simply put, the ordinary work of an unemployed television director of the period (ask yourself: would John Rich or E.W. Swackhammer have shot these in quite this way?) Altman, in a sense, took the opportunity to free himself of the deadening pace and stylistic no-mans-land of his television days to open himself up to the period--these are both shot circa 1965 and straddle early-sixties (which is to say late-fifties) jauntiness of spirit and male-dominated sexual attitude, as well as having a foot planted in the soil of the next generation...(dreadful, Raymond)...anyway, you dig my meaning, no?
Altman directed a couple of other self-financed shorts in this period including one called "The Party" which was shot at his house in Mandeville Canyon during an actual party--I posted about it long ago but alas the youtube account that posted the video is no longer. There's also a marijuana induced short called "Pot Au Feu" (har har) which I've never come across, as well as a birthday present for his wife, Kathryn Reed, that he made one year "when I was broke...and so this was my present to her".That film is called--inexplicably--"The Kathryn Reed Story". If anyone out there has any knowledge of these films whereabouts...
My favorite secret memory of my television-centric youth was the discovery of an all night movie program on KTLA called Movies 'Til Dawn. The lonely stillness of the logo --a picture of the lights of an unidentified city at night (sans music) that would suddenly interrupt a movie in mid-scene (no well timed act-breaks necessary) so spooked and moved me that the name of the program came to be synonomous in my young mind with a shadowy, secret and glamourously unknowable world (in black and white) which could only be contemplated properly at four AM. I named my first CD of original music after this program. And, of course, this weblog. "Movies 'Til Dawn" still conveys to me a sense of private nocturnal musings on secret obsessional pursuits. All of which may suddenly--without warning--go to commercial.
