Movies Til Dawn

A pleasant holiday weekend to any and all of you reading this (though do you have a Thanksgiving-style holiday this weekend in Greece, Marianna?) What better way to commemorate the ignoble founding of our noble country than by invoking the Three Stooges on this sacrosanct holiday. To my great pleasure, an enterprising youtuber who posts as "The Curtis Files" has taken the bold step of posting, in two parts, the very best--in my opinion--Stooge short featuring Curley, 1941's "An Ache In Every Stake" . What has this film to do with Thanksgiving? Nothing in particular. Except in one hilarious scene (think it's at the beginning of part two as posted below) Curley is told to stuff a turkey...and after "shaving some ice" he performs the task with great panache and a literalness that will utterly revulse you. Indeed, revulsion is a feeling that one must embrace in order to enjoy the Stooges. Why, as a kid, was I allowed to freely watch these orgies of...

A large plot point in "City Island" (no spoiler, no worries) has to do with an acting class that Andy Garcia's character is attending and their assignment for the week, which is to think of their worst personal secret and turn it into a monologue for the class to hear. In due course, Andy does so. But so did the other acting students. So, in due course, I filmed monologues--mostly improvised by the actors--with the intention of showing bits of them strung together, leading up to Andy's big moment. Guess what? IT ALL GOT CUT. All of it. I wonder if some of you reading this blog are starting to wonder if there is any of the movie left--or if, in a fit of self-censorship I simply erased my own movie. Fear not. There are still ninety-eight minutes of wonderful entertainment left. But the below edited "class monologues" sequence once again proves the futility of trying to anticipate what should be dropped from the script prior to shooting; I actually fought hard...

My documentary, "Tis Autumn: The Search For Jackie Paris", has--unbelievably--opened in London, at a fine theater which is also showing the Coen Brothers movie "Burn After Reading" (which I didn't much care for, but still it's rather nice to share a marquee with them). Click here to listen to a podcast I did the other day (via good old fashioned long distance telephone--no Skype, no I-chat, not even a cell phone, just a nice landline) with Jason Solomens of The Guardian. Not one to be shy of shameless self-promotion, here's the four star Time Out London review. And below, courtesy of my old friend Leopold Wurm, a few photos of the cinema in London where the film is playing. Show me a proud filmmaker and I'll show you an internet whore. Or perhaps it's the other way around. I'll be back with more City Island news shortly. Meanwhile, dig the "Tis Autumn" trailer below.   Subscribe in a reader

We're back, with access once again to dear, darling youtube and another cut scene--which I mean in both ways: the scene is both edited and excised from the finished film. It features Andy Garcia and Emily Mortimer saying goodnight to each other at the Roosevelt Island tram station. This scene took an exceptional amount of urban planning--we had to secure the private use of the tram for the end of the scene, and use a Roosevelt Island Tram Operator to take us up and back at our will for the interior of the tram. All of this work and the damn thing gets cut. But that's the nature of the beast called cinema. If it doesn't work in the finished film, it has no business being there, no matter how hard the scene was to get or how good it is. As a wise man whose name I can't remember once said, "Any hack can cut a bad scene, but it takes an artist to cut a good one". Good line. Maybe I thought of it. A funny thing happened on the evening of this shoot. I had to go to ...

I'm sitting, this Sunday in November, in a dark room at Post Works, the lab that's handling "City Island". The color correct is underway--the process by which the color elements are balanced for the finished print. Our cinematographer, Vanja Cernjul, is shooting a Showtime series by day, so the color correct has been proceeding at night, after he wraps, and on the weekend. He's sitting next to me as I write this, dozing off. I have a deleted scene that I was going to post, but frigging' YouTube is telling me I'm not a member (untrue) and making it hard for me to become one again. And after all I did for youtube! Stay tuned. I'll figure out a solution and be back, hopefully tomorrow, with more clips.   Subscribe in a reader

Re: my recent television-centric memories: what do the following shows have in common (aside from being in perpetual re-runs on local syndicated television between 1970-1976)? "Get Smart", "The Partridge Family", "Nanny And the Professor", "Bewitched", "Hogan's Heroes", "I Dream Of Jeannie", "The Bill Cosby Show", "Petticoat Junction", "The Fugitive", "Gidget", and "The Flying Nun"? The too-obscure-to-be-guessed-at answer is: Dick Wilson, a soft, mustachioed character actor who made at least one pit stop on most major network shows. A reliable, working character actor, he might never have expected to become well-known or super successful, but he did work an awful lot--not a bad place for a middle-aged actor to be. And then along came the toilet paper company. Charmin cast Wilson as "Mr. Whipple", the fussy super-market manager who warned customers not to squeeze s...

To my amusement, I see that I touched a chord with a few readers by referencing my 70's era television viewing habits. Amazing how that decade's youth (like myself and a few of you who wrote in) can remember whole blocks of programming times--I somehow suspect the same isn't true of television addicts in later decades, once the seasons got less defined and shows started getting pulled early or rescheduled at the whim of panicked network executives. Mr. Fisher's recitation of his no doubt beloved Friday night lineup brings back memories to me--I was never able to stay up to quite the finish of "The Odd Couple", however. Then there were Saturday night's on CBS--Mary Tyler Moore (8 to 8:30), Bob Newhart (8:30-9:00) capped by the one hour variety blast of Carol Burnett. Again, the final musical number usually got dozed through, but I remember always waking up for the last song, viz: Once I got interested in movies, however, nightly network programming grew a l...

It's Obama Day--sorry, Election Day, and I'm proud to announce that instead of watching 24 hours of non-stop election coverage, I'm watching (mostly listening really) to a very charming movie called "Come On Get Happy", a dramatization of the backstage story involved in the making of the seminal 1970's hit TV show, "The Partridge Family". I became obsessed with the Partridge's when they first hit syndication--this must have been in the mid-seventies, just a few years after they began airing. Naturally, being a wise-ass ten year old, I was drawn to the wise-ass ten year old Danny Partridge (the ever-since doomed and self-destructive Danny Bonaduce). Oddly, I was also rather attracted--though I was too young to quite put words to it--to Shirley Jones who played the mother, Shirley Partridge. Somewhere around the same time I caught her Oscar winning turn in "Elmer Gantry" and was pleased and not necessarily shocked to discover that Mother...