Movies Til Dawn

Movies Til Dawn happily announces the beginning of production of its host's Raymond De Felitta's new film, "City Island". Which explains, partially, the paucity of posts which, in the post-happy blog world, (did I mean "post-happy" or post happy?) is easily misconstrued as disinterest, dis-engagement and--worst of all--pre-blog-abandonment laziness. (As if keeping these frigging blogs to begin with isn't its own sign of displaced laziness. I began this whole experiment as a way to justify the hours a day I lose on youtube watching cool old clips of stuff). Most importantly, when production of "City Island" begins this blog will transform itself into a daily diary of the shooting of said film. There will be commentary, clips of dailies and other ephermera. You will be able to follow the daily production of what is now laughingly referred to as an "independent film" (though we are, in fact, truly minus any studio and only up and going t...

Released in the first week of 1957, "Three Little Bops" was no doubt seen, chuckled at and as quickly dismissed as any other cartoon of the time--the time being the waning days of the Warners animation unit. Over the years, however, a rather sizable cult has grown up around the film and the jazz score that accompanies it--several bands have even performed the entire piece as a stand-alone concert work. And if the below links to a few different sites are any indication, "Three Little Bops" continues to live on in the imaginations of film buffs and provoke some rather provocative commentaries. The film's premise is a re-telling of the three little pigs story in which the pigs are a trio of bop musicians and the big bad wolf is a square, no-talent horn player whose greatest desire is to join their band. Stan Freberg narrates the tale with a strong bop-vocal performance and apparently provided the other voices (pigs and wolf) as well. Shorty Rogers arranged the mu...

I've written before about the fabulous film school education I receieved--not at the American Film Institute (whose masters graciously bestowed an MFA upon me before tossing me into the mean streets of early 1990's Hollywood)--but from staring glassy-eyed, hour after hour, at local Los Angeles television in the 1970's and early 80's. Every local station aired movies--old features, old shorts, good and bad fifties and sixties television...in the days before cable, it was possible to catch almost all the necessary to be seen movies on local TV--brutally cut up, yes, and if in Scope featuring horrible pan-and-scan work (I often wondered if the job of panning-and-scanning the scope prints fell to the drunkards...it seems like the kind of job somebody would think they would be able to perform while inebriated--and if they were no good at it, who could say? For there is truly no such things as a "good" pan-and-scan). What I didn't realize until recently was how ...

Continuing on our unplanned but highly appropriate month long birthday tribute to Orson Welles, I've discovered two clips of an interview conducted with the big dog in 1960. Clearly this is a part of longer interview-- on IMDB the film is known as "Interview With Orson Welles" (gee, they really put their heads together coming up with that title) and the running time is said to be 57 minutes. According to the only comment posted, the entire interview was screened at the Santa Barbara Film Festival in 2005. (Funny...my film, "The Thing About My Folks" was at that very festival that very year and actually won the Audience Award. Had I been there I would certainly have blown off my own screening to view this instead. Only thanks to the films writer, producer and star--a former television personality--I wasn't invited. The poor guy seemed to regard my participation in any publicity--even a local film festival--as tantamount to stealing the last droplets of water...