Movies Til Dawn

Having just returned from the sixty-first annual Cannes Film Festival where, like many others, I had my hand out looking for money for my newest film (hence the paucity of posts this month--begging is a full time gig), I decided to look for some vintage Cannes material on youtube hoping to see what resemblance, if any, the current festival has to its no doubt infinitely more sedate and appropriate earlier incarnation. And what turned up? One of the absolutely silliest pieces of film I've yet found posted on the good and great thing called youtube--courtesy of the invaluble Ira (TV DAYS) Gallen (I've grabbed some of his stuff before--particularly good are the unedited dailies of an interview with Otto Preminger which I posted sometime this past fall. Look it up, if you dare). The below appears to be from an informational film on what being at the twelfth annual Cannes Film Festival (1959) was really like. Who was it made for? Where was it shown? I've no idea. But after seei...

Happy birthday, Orson Welles. Tuesday, assuming you'd not only outlived the actuarials but had quit the food, the booze, the cigars and taken up yoga and lost two hundred pounds, you would have turned ninety-three. I'm sure wherever you currently reside, you regret none of it. I have four..."cultural heroes" as I think of them. In no particular order then: Welles, Duke Ellington, Vladimir Nabokov, Preston Sturges. What links them? Chiefly, I think, their mutual inability to be comfortably linked to anybody else. Welles is no more accurately defined as an "actor/director" than Ellington is as a "jazz composer/musician" or Nabokov an "academic/novelist." And Sturges was resolutely neither a standard-issue professional screenwriter (witness his lackluster 30's credits--and don't bother telling me about "Power and The Glory" or "Easy Living"--neither are all that terrific) nor was he anything remotely resembling a ...

One of the tenets of this weblog, since it's immortal inception last summer, was to find various things of interest that were popping up on youtube and link them--historically, anecdotally--giving some shape to the wonderful montage of archival material available now on the web. Oftentimes this is relatively easy: pick a topic (an actor, a director, a movie) and go! Other times I find myself collecting clips and stringing together ever more peculiar scenarios (a few months ago I started posting clips of the movie "Stormy Weather" while also using back-up clips of Bill Robinson from other movies to mount a whole new scenario, which involved nothing less than a total re-write of SW which would, in my humble estimation, have turned that valueble but--let's face it--B-minus musical into a Freed-Unit style classic of the genre. Oddly, the earth didn't exactly move after all my troubles). What am I saying? That today (and in the past on occasion) I have failed in my mi...