Movies Til Dawn

Certain actors photograph 'smart.' They know what's coming, they've seen it before, they're well ahead of the plodding screenwriter who's providing them with the bon mots that they are about to toss off. I recall reading an interview with Jonathan Demme where he said that the main reason he wanted Anthony Hopkins to play Hannibal Lecter was because you knew, by watching Hopkins, that he was smart. And that would humanize Lecter and make him interesting to audiences. So it was with Myrna "Mrs. Nick Charles" Loy. She had a natural, innate intelligence and humor--which, as the thirties and forties progressed, made her a perfect sort of swank, New Yorker magazine reading, Martini drinking, Cedric Gibbons set-inhabiting, MGM under contract to-ing kind of dame. And this makes it especially interesting that, in an earlier incarnation, she was, in fact, a hotsy-totsy girl of the bootleg years. For years, (she started in silents--discovered by Rudolph Valenti...

How could we skip through this survey of yesteryear's male fantasy objects without a bow to (and perhaps a roll in the hay with) Clara Bow. Poor Clara. Her personal morals were so bad that In a town where nobody thought twice about drinking and driving, playing musical beds and staying up for days on bennies, she managed to get herself ostracized by the movie colony! (Being labeled the town slut in Hollywood isn't, apparently, an acheivement to be proud of. Somewhat like Dorothy Parker's line about New York being a bad place to be the "town drunk" in.) Between taking on the entire USC football team (or was it only the offence?) and bedding every contract player at Paramount (and, who knows, probably RKO and Universal), Clara managed to get "a reputation". Although she was the "It" girl of the twenties, by the time sound arrived she was more or less on her way out. Typically the studio blamed her Brooklyn accented nasal-inflected voice on her ...

Continuing our lecherous survey of long-dead hotties from the bathtub gin generation ("Oh, you kid!"), we come now to the majorly successful and now utterly forgotten Nancy Carroll. Though she was generally considered cute and adorable rather than dangerous and vampy, she was nevertheless quite a package--and a hell of a singer and dancer and a much better actress than many of her contemporaries. So what happened to this top-flight early sound movie star to cause her star to dim so quickly? The answer: she was generally regarded as a complete bitch to work with. Difficult, hard to please, pissed off about the roles they made her play.(In those days, of course, actors were not in the drivers seat--studios assigned their stars, who were under contract, whatever they thought was appropriate. Oh, to have that system back in place!) Her star peaked early in the sound era and came abruptly to a halt when Paramount decided they'd had enough. A few years and a few movies later,...

My film, "Tis Autumn: The Search For Jackie Paris", has officially opened in LA, for its one-week Oscar qualifying run. Anyone interested in seeing the film on the big screen, projected on 35mm (yes, even though its a digitally shot low-budget documentary, we've gone to the trouble of film-outing to satisfy the Academy's requirements) should high-tail it over to Laemmle's Regent Showcase at 614 N. La Brea Ave. (near Melrose) and catch one of the two daily showings--12:15 and 7:40 are the showtimes. For more information on the movie, go to the "for more information on the movie" part of this weblog. On the right hand side. Over there...up a little...you got it... The film's official opening will be in New York City on December 7th of this year. In other words, that's when it will be reviewed, publicized, and hotly debated. By then, of course, anyone in the hep world whose interested in the movie will have illegally downloaded it and burned multipl...

Next on the list of HTILF's comes the adorable and very tiny (under five feet) and usually scantily clad dancer Ann Pennington. Ann Pennington was another Florenz Ziegfeld star on Broadway, starting in the teens (actually her first Broadway chorus girl credit is in 1911!) and peaking in the late twenties when she was in her mid-thirites--considered quite old for those times, but as you will see in the marvelous clip below, still filled with vitality. Or as they might have said back then "pep!" In addition to being a stage star and a wonderful dancer, she turned up in a number of silent films--unusual for a Broadway musical star at that time as the two worlds were, for the most part, snobbishly distinct and seperate--and during the sound transition she appeared in a number of significant early musicals. One of them, the lost "Gold-Diggers Of Broadway", continually threatens to turn up--currently only the last reel of this remarkable film is extant, though there ...

A reader (!) has complained that this weblog is light on the girlie-mag stuff that, it is assumed, attracts a real audience. So why not begin an investigation into some of the hottest, most salacious and oftentimes mysteriously tragic femmes that graced the entertainment world of the twenties and early thirties. First up is the delicious Mary Eaton--I mentioned her yesterday as she appears in the Eddie Cantor "Midnight Frolic" short for a second. Here, if anyone cares, is a proper and compelling bio of Mary Eaton on Wikipedia. The long and the short of it is: early success with her singing and dancing brother and sisters; breakout success for Mary before the age of twenty on Broadway; big-time success dancing for Ziegfeld, co-starring with Cantor etc.; significant early talkie appearences (below is from the Marx Bros. first film, "The Cocoanuts"--she was also the star of the fascinating and exhausting "Glorifying The American Girl.") Then nada. Hard time...

Occasionally a piece of film turns up that stands at the intersection of every single one of my peculiar set of obsessions--old showbiz history, New York City in the twenties and thirties, filmmaking, old music, nightclubs, dancing girls, etc. Such a piece of film is posted below. The film is a short, shot in early 1929. Titled "A Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic " it stars Eddie Cantor and is, essentially, a filmed recording of what it was like to be sitting in a nightclub, all ginned-up on bootleg hooch, one long-forgotten evening in the 1920's. (The Ziegfield Midnight Frolics were, essentially, an "a-list" bonus event--after a Ziegfeld show, the celebrities of the day and the public who could pay the frieght were invited upstairs to a special cabaret atop Ziegfeld's theater to see an "intimate" nightclub revue. A very inside New York happening and one that this film preserves for us.) In it, Cantor performs in blackface--for no apparent reason--a hand...

Continuing on the obsessive pursuit to map out a film geeks education in pre-cable, pre-VCR, pre-O.J. Simpson Los Angeles in the early 1970's: The LA County Museam showed old movies on a regular basis and that's where I got my first taste of Eddie Cantor --in a 1933 movie called "Roman Scandals" which--if I'm not mistaken--never (or rarely) turned up on TV because of pre-Code naughtiness involving scantily clad chorus girls (one of whom was a twenty year old girl from Jamestown named Lucille McGillicuddy--sorry, Lucille Ball). Eddie Cantor was one of the biggest names in show-business in the 1920's and early 1930's and as far as I can tell is completely forgotten today, except by people who really ought to get out of the house more. (So let that be a warning, Ben Stiller.) Cantor was a vaudeville headliner, a Broadway star and a successful early "talkie" star--his hit Bway show "Whopee" was filmed in 1930 (lousily) and started him on a ...

The above picture is from a movie I directed a couple of years ago called "The Thing About My Folks." As you can tell, it stars Peter Falk and Paul Reiser (who also wrote the script) as a father and a son who bond on an improptu roadtrip. It's on HBO a lot these days. There. End of plug. I mention it because my oldest friend, "Lawyer Fred", recently reminded me that one of the early highlights of our "movies on TV" educations was watching "The Great Race." Directed by Blake Edwards, and starring Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Natalie Wood and Peter Falk among others, "The Great Race" was one of several movies that played on network prime-time television as big-event airings in the early 1970's. The others I recall were "Dr. Doolittle", "Born Free", and "It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World." Like the "Mad/World," "The Great Race" was conceived as a sort of high-budget homage to roll...

Below I've posted an extraordinary piece of filmmaking from 1935. It runs just under ten minutes but is well worth your time. "Symphony In Black" is a short film featuring Duke Ellington and his band, with guest appeareances by Billie Holiday and Scatman Crothers, believe it or not. (Holiday sounds like herself but is otherwise unrecognizable from her later self--here she's young, plump and healthy looking. Crothers, later to become famous for his recurring role on "Chico And The Man" is twenty-five years old here and quite the dude. He's not credited, but he plays Billie's two-timing boyfriend.) There is no dialogue--it is a purely visual representation of an early extended work by Ellington which is in five short parts. If you run out of patience (which I hope wont be the case) or have to abort due to a previously scheduled event, skip to the last two minutes, the section called "Harlem Rhythm." The specialty dancer in this sequence is ...

My apologies to Eddie Fisher for hurrying along his journey by a year. He turned seventy-nine this past August 10, not 80 as I thought. I don't like getting birthday's incorrect. (Not that I'm particularly obsessed with my own birthday, agreeing with Gore Vidal who once wondered why anyone "would choose to celebrate time's ruthless one way passage"). Still, I was quick to assume that it was IMDB's fault, not mine. But alas, IMDB has Eddie Fisher's birthday correct--8/10/28. It's just that I've thought it was 2008 all year. Thanks to a reader (!) named Betty Anne for pointing this out. She also informs us that Eddie and Connie Stevens have recently been in touch. Oh, what I'd give for an MP3 of that conversation. Moving from a mid-fifties icon to an early sixties icon: Last Sunday I saw one of the best scripted musicals I've ever seen. "Jersey Boys", the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, is far more than the usual ju...

Why bother being surprised anymore at what can be found on youtube? One of my favorite early childhood TV habits was Warner Brothers cartoons. (Never Disney, though. Never so much as a cartoon--and forget the boring, overlong features.) Loony Tunes/Merry Melodies cartoons were run every afternoon of KTTV, Channel 11. This was supplemented on the weekends (Sunday morning I think--and on CBS if I'm not mistaken) with the "Bugs Bunny Road Runner Hour" which had the advantage of containing the above "special material" opening. I've been singing this song to myself for the past thirty years without having seen it performed once in the intervening years. Now here it is, thanks to Al Gore... Some questions arise from the above clip: 1) Who wrote "On With The Show This Is It!"? 2) Is that the title? Or is it "Overture, Curtain, Lights!" ? 3) Was it indeed written specially for this cartoon series, or was it originally written for a Dennis Morgan/...

I'm closing out this weeks blogorreah as I began it, with the masterful Duke Ellington on film. Below is one of the most interesting five minutes of film you'll ever see. (Unless, of course, you prefer action/adventure movies about pirates, comic book movies about men who are spiders, movies like "300" which I don't really know how to define, or paranoid thrillers about the number 23. In other words, unless you're normal.) "Record Making With Duke Ellington" is a promotional short made for Irving Mills' (Duke's first manager, publisher and promoter) short-lived Master and Variety Labels in 1937. This little movie shows you the entire process of record making using the Ellington band in the real studio (as opposed to a set) and taking you through the whole process of creating a 78 RPM record. In some ways this merely points up, to me, how much more complex technology used to be -- the analogue brain that figured out the various machines requi...

Having mentioned him yesterday, the breeze blew in his new myspace address where you can find an excellent interview and a number of his numbingly dark and funny poems Nick appears in two of my movies: "Two Family House", where he plays a deeply unpleasant hotel clerk (possibly a narcotics abuser recently released from prison, given his haircut...) and "Tis Autumn", where as I noted yesterday he reads, in tones both dulcet and deapan, from Norman Bogner's 1968 novel "The Madonna Complex." The opening pages of "Dino", his Dean Martin biography, are without a doubt the best and truest account of how what we now call show-biz came into being. But calling "Dino" a Dean Martin biography is a bit like calling "Othello" the "play about a hankercheif."

Another birthday (already past) this week. Legendary director, writer, painter, anecdotalist, "man's man" and smoker John Huston was born on August 5, 1906, and passed from this world on August 28, 1987. I met John Huston one weekend in 1981, when I was sixteen. "Annie" (you should forgive the expression) was about to go into general release and the Directors Guild threw a "Weekend with John Huston" party aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California. There were screenings of his films (all on 16mm) and q&a's with Huston himself. He wore a white jumpsuit, a white beard, and was so magnetic, charismatic and dangerous that--to my adolescent eye--most of the women on board (at least the ones that I was checking out) had eyes only for the seventy-five year old adventurer-director. He told stories of his filmmaking past--but never in a self-aggrandizing way. Indeed, he was a curious mixture of self-love and lack of self-esteem. He was happy givin...

Yesterday my friend Nick Tosches (author of, among many other things, "Dino", the best book ever about show-biz) e-mailed me the following fact about this coming Friday. "Eighty-seven years ago this coming Friday, on August 10, 1920, Mamie Smith stood before the microphone at the Okeh recording studio in New York City and sang real loud: I’m gonna do like a Chinaman, Go out and get some hop; Get myself a gun And shoot myself a cop." Thanks, Nick. By the way, Nick appears in "Tis Autumn: The Search For Jackie Paris" reading from Norman Bogner's "The Madonna Complex." If for no other reason, one should see my movie for Nick's priceless rendering of an orgy scene, 60's style, where two women discuss how Jackie Paris' voice enters them and "has carnal knowlege" of them. But I digress...) August 10 is important, music-wise, for also being the birthdate of Eddie Fisher, Elizabeth Taylor's fourth ex-husband, Debbie Reynolds...

In the same year that "Stormy Weather" was made at Fox, another musical featuring a plethora of great black jazz entertainers was being shot over at MGM in Culver City. This was "Cabin In The Sky", which was, I believe, the film directorial debut of the great Vincent Minnelli--now, alas, remembered primarily as David Gest's posthumous ex-father-in-law. (Minnelli is credited the same year with directing a Red Skelton vehicle, "I Dood It", but I'm not sure which was shot first.) "Cabin In The Sky" was another middle-of-the-night discovery in my television watching youth--I wonder if there was a reason that these mostly all-black films weren't being aired during daylight or prime-time hours? In any event, this one was a real find for me because it was the first footage I ever saw of Duke Ellington and his orchestra. In addition to Ellington, Lena Horne, the great (and mysteriously forgotten) Ethel Waters and Louis Armstrong all turn up ...

Shortly after "Stormy Weather" finally appeared on "Movies 'Til Dawn" (see previous post--if that's your idea of a good time), a movie called "King Of Burlesque" re-awakened, after a long slumber in the Fox vaults, on late-night local LA television. I knew of it because one of my Fats Waller LP's (not one of the RCA Vintage reissues but a strange, more obscure re-issue with a blank, cream-colored album cover which simply listed the songs in black bold-face type with no accompanying graphics) contained a long-ish cut of Fats singing "I've Got My Fingers Crossed." Now what was odd about this recording to my young ears was the sound of a thousand tap-dancing feet--the album notes indicated it was from the soundtrack of "King Of Burlesque" but gave no other information. Somehow, though, I tracked down the year--1936--and that the film starred Warner Baxter, Jack Oakie and Alice Faye (probably via Leonard Maltin's early e...

I wrote earlier this week about the film education one could get from watching local LA television, pre-cable, in the 1970's. But I neglected--on purpose--to mention my favorite secret memory of my television-centric youth. It was the discovery of an all night movie program--I forget which channel, but my guess is KTTV--called Movies 'Til Dawn. The lonely stillness of the logo --a picture of the lights of LA at night, sans music--that would suddenly interrupt a movie in mid-scene 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) that 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. Like being nine years old and sneaking off to watch an old movie on TV by...

Happy Birthday. It's August 4th (this weekend), not July 4th as he claimed for so many years. The excellent Columbia University radio station, WKCR , will be playing hours of him this weekend.

Learning HTML can be fun and exciting! Watch as I stumble my way through this... To learn more about my soon to be released movie "Tis Autumn: The Search For Jackie Paris," click here Here is the poster from my film, "Two Family House".