Movies Til Dawn

I wasn't planning on posting until the New Year--being incredibly busy with lying around my office watching screeners of the current crop of would-be Oscar contenders. But then "That's Entertainment" came on TCM...and my wife and son and I stood around the kitchen watching it...and it's rather riveting and rather distressing a document. For "That's Entertainment"--which I saw upon its first release in 1974 when I was ten--is best understood as a "Reader's Digest" style tool for the uninitiated, a kind of home sampler of what musicals (specifically MGM musicals) had to offer minus the silly plotlines. Indeed, that's what the world needed in 1974 more than customized DVD reissues of "complete boxed sets" of the actual films. Just a little nudge to remind people that the history that seemed so distant but which had, in fact, only rather recently been made, was a history worth clinging to and not relegating to the ashtray of b...

Click here to read the first of two marvelously insightful reviews from the U.K of my documentary "Tis Autumn: The Search For Jackie Paris". And click here to read the second. The DVD street date for the movie is March 2009 but just the other day I received an advance order from my producer, David Zellerford. Ironically, this completely independently made (read: no outside financiers) documentary has resulted in the best produced DVD of any of my movies, Lion's Gate having botched the "Two Family House" DVD with an extra-cheapo, no-frills edition and New Line having tossed "The Thing About My Folks" out as casually as fish three days old. (I would have said "three day old fish" but then I wouldn't have been quoting...can anyone name the movie the above line comes from and the author of that line? If so, I'll send you a free DVD...) I see from Dan's comment that he, like myself, received his opera education at the hands of the ...

What better way to say farewell to Warner Brothers (yes, we're working on the day after Christmas) then a screening of the meta-cartoon "Duck Amuck" a Chuck Jones meditation on the power of the animator versus the character, which speaks deeply to all directors, especially those of us who deal with real flesh and blood actors who we sometimes wish we could erase... Jones created this cartoon in 1953. It probably came and went from theaters as quickly as any other cartoon, laughed at and forgotten instantly only to be re-discovered on television and eventually voted "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress--one of three Jones cartoons to be accorded this dubious honor. The cartoon is madly amusing and the notion of finishing a stretch of this blog--which has become consumed with the filmmaking process and how it intersects with film history--with a film about the technical creation of a film was just too...damn, it, the tears in my eyes are preventing...

A few mementos, courtesy of my I-Phone, of our stay at Warner Brothers. Below is the plaque on the wall of the sound building, listing titles of Warner Brothers movies that were mixed in this building. All of the soundstages have similar plaques, memorializing the films shot on the given stage. Steven Strait's image on the screen, David Leonard (the editors) back to camera... Juliana Marguiles... And a view of the line that Vince (Andy Garcia) has to stand on in order to achieve his dream of...(no spoilers)... Outtakes are as old as the movies. Below is a reel of outtakes from old Warner Brothers movies. Among the screw ups you'll see Bogie, Bette Davis, Cagney, Jimmy Stewart, Edward G. Robinson, and a quite funny John Garfield.   Subscribe in a reader

Day four of the sound mix proceeds as the previous three days have; much detailed back-and-forthing over individual lines, effects and music cues, often to the point of losing the thread of what's going on in the course of the actual movie. Nothing unusual. Sidney Lumet, in his book "Making Movies", says that God punishes directors for getting to work with beautiful actresses by making them endure the sound mix. Frankly, I rather prefer being in this darkened room, watching my movie over and over than being in a trailer trying to talk a neurotic actress into coming to the set. But the downtime is extreme for those not actually operating the mixing console. In the pre-internet era, one did crossword puzzles by the dozen. Now I watch youtube. And lo, what have I found and posted below other than an old Max Fleischer cartoon documenting the arrival of the talkie. "Finding His Voice" , released in 1929, is a marvelous introduction to now ancient technology--though t...

As I write this, I'm ensconced on Dubbing Stage 6 at Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank, California where the sound mix (re-record) of "City Island" is underway. We are privileged to be working on one of the biggest stages in one of the best post facilities in the business, with an excellent mixer, Brad Sherman. The journey this movie has taken us on continues to be unpredictably interesting and almost always fufilling in ways that I hadn't expected when we started. So as not to act too impressed with our surroundings, I'm crashed out on the leather sofa's in the back of this cavernous room, cooly banging the keys of my MacBook Pro, a piece of equipment that is now de rigeur pretty much everywhere I seem to go... Warner Brothers is also a marvelous place to wind up doing the final sound work because of its fascinating part in the history of sound film. Vitaphone--a Warner Brothers subsidiary--was the company that developed a way to marry sound and picture in t...

Lo. A previously forgotten, unposted but fully edited little scene between Ezra Miller and Carrie Baker Reynolds was just discovered among my copious download files. This scene didn't make it past the first assembly--not due to quality but simply because we streamlined the timeline of the story and this connecting moment no longer was needed to connect anything. I appreciate a number of the comments asking for on-set stories and stills. The stories are, alas, few as the shoot was a pleasurable experience (and if it hadn't been I doubt I'd be posting "bad-mouth" tales of tribulations). Generally the stories I have are specifically situational as to how scenes were achieved, what obstacles we faced, etc. But let me dig through the debris of my memories of this past summer and see what shards remain. The stills, however, are another matter. I simply can't post them for two reasons: the actors haven't approved them yet and the financing companies don't wan...

Aware as I am at how much you readers enjoy outtakes and clips of my movie, and seeing as how I'm running out of them and need to make another movie if for no other reason so as to provide material for my blog, I decided to get smart and take somebody else's outtakes and post them. Dig the below outtakes from one of my favorite twenty-first century movies, Jon Favreau's "Made", starring him and Vince Vaughn. This criminally underseen comedy so outpaces it's predecessor, the much overrated "Swingers", that it's hard for me to understand how the movie came and went with as little fanfare as it did. (People always seem to be saying that about my movies--they think its a compliment but its really quite depressing--so I should give Favreau and his movie a break). If you haven't seen "Made", I urge you to rent it, stream it, d-load it, whatever. You'll either love it or hate it, but strangely even if you don't love it you'll ...

As a convention, the credit sequence is as old as the hills. Movies used to open with a formal presentation of the credits of the major stars and major technical help (cameraman, costumes, sets, editor, music) responsible for the movie you were about to see. Over the years, though, styles changed and unions got involved. Soon, every technician who worked on the movie had to have a credit. Why not? They deserve it. Thus the interminable final credits of movies today, which most of us--shamefully--don't sit through. It's amusing to see films from the early thirties which--I believe--was the period (at least after sound came in) of the shortest credit sequences; the director was frequently listed on the title card, beneath the title. Often the actors were listed over images of them from the film. At the time the most prominently positioned credit--last before picture--was given to the producer. This reflected the studio system and its attitude toward filmmaking at it's peak. T...

Part of my fascination with the Three Stooges has always been the dark underbelly of their backstage lives and how much of it played out in their movies . As a kid I felt I could trace quite a bit of their personal setbacks and tragedies through their movies, though I wasn't quite sure of what I was being made privy too. One of the earliest examples of this was the disturbing observation that Curley, at some point, simply wasn't the same Curley as before; in some shorts he is noticeably slower, more removed and uncertain. These came at the end of his filmography, in the 1945-47 period (Leonard Maltin's "Great Movie Shorts" was a seminal text of my youth). In one short, "Half Wits Holiday", I noticed that Curley simply vanished in mid pie-fight. It was also the last listed as having featured him. Before hearing the story, I intuited something dark about that pie fight. And upon reading Moe Howard's autobiography I discovered what it was. Curley, it se...