Movies Til Dawn

Herewith three more installments (thus completing the one-hour installation on silent directors) from the Kevin Brownlow/David Gill epic "Hollywod" (see previous post if you have no idea what I'm rattling on about). In these sections, Brownlow and Gill focus on the three most innovative directors of the silent era: Rex Ingram, F.W. Murnau and King Vidor. Ingram (pictured above), the most forgotten of the three, is lovingly evoked in Michael Powell's two-part autobiography--Powell worked for him when Ingram abandoned Hollywood and opened his own studio in Nice (a pre-Coppola off-Hollywood move if ever there was one...and as pre-destined to fail as most other attempts made over the years by other maverick filmmakers to break free of the studio cycle). Read this fine Wikipedia entry for a good introduction to this maverick's career and life. Ingram, hugely successful in the early twenties, was finished by the dawn of sound and lived another twenty years in ignominy...

Below is a real find. It's a mere sliver of a mammoth documentary by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill called "Hollywood" --a comprehensive history of the silent film era which, if I'm not mistaken, I recall seeing on public television in the early 1980's, before it seemingly vanished from sight forever. Some lovely individual, the puzzlinglly named Quallgin, seems to have a copy of it (it doesn't appear to have ever made it to DVD) and has sliced up some highly digestible ten minute bits for your delectation on youtube. I've posted two parts of a one hour episode on silent film directors--"The Man With The Megaphone". (The series was presented in thirteen one-hour installments--totalling a whopping 676 minutes). Silent film--aside from silent comedy--has long been a blind spot of mine. Rather than finding the films themselves interesting, I tend to become more fascinated with the meta-film occurring alongside the movie--the making of the film. Ho...

Dig the following, compiled by the very twenties-oriented youtube poster Aaron1912 (I've embedded quite a bit of his collection over the last year and a half, so a belated thanks is owed to him). It's a wonderful collection of views of New York in the 1920's, including extended sequences from Harold Lloyd's 1928 "Speedy" (he's the cab-driver and Babe Ruth is the passenger who asks to be taken to Yankee Stadium). Note that trolley cars are still in use in Manhattan (when did they finally go away?) and a few fine views of the El trains are on display. Also the bizarre horse&carriage chase toward the end begs the question: how did sequences like this get accomplished in the pre-digital age? Did people regularly die during the making of comedies? Truly breathtaking, some of these stunts. And by the way, click here to read the very charming answers to the questions that I asked "thisispinkharma" in our blog/interview/chain/thingy.   Subscribe in...

Let us say it's April 22, 1899 and your Thomas Edison. What might you be doing with yourself? The answer is: standing on a elevated train with a camera, photographing a view of Upper Manhattan--specifically the 104th Street curve. Now the El trains have long been relegated to the dumping ground of New York technology so I can't speak specifically about this curve and its precise location. My guess is that this is the Third Avenue El (taken down in the 1950's) and the distant countryside you see would be the still undeveloped Bronx. I imagine Edison selected the curve for recording as it supplied a natural sweep and perspective for the camera to capture--remember that camera's at this time were fixed, i.e. immovable and thus forced to capture whatever entered the frame with no ability to follow it. This film is precisely what I was referring to yesterday with my theory of what's important to film watchers a hundred years later: no plot, no unnecessary dramatics. Just...

As I'm in New York this week, checking the final print of "City Island", I'm a bit pressed for writing time. Nonetheless, New York City always works it's mysterious magic on me and--like so many others--I find myself walking about my home town in a trance, imagining what everything might have looked like fifty or a hundred years ago. I'm always amazed at New York's ability to retain the past within the present--staring at Central Park South this morning, with snowfall covering the street and the park, I was momentarily convinced that 1899, 1929, 1959 and 2009 were all of one and the same. I have a theory that most movies will fail to live on in the popular culture more than fifty or a hundred years. Certainly many films from the past--particularly from the late twenties and early thirties--use plot lines that are mere puzzlements to us now. (If you didn't know, for instance, that once upon a time in a very different America a woman could sue a man for ...

I've been tagged by one of our faithful readers, Marianna from Greece, to participate in a sort of chain-letter style blogger event in which one blogger interviews another. Then, as a result, a fellow blogger who reads the interview must make contact and ask me to interview them. Does this make sense? In any event, learning to participate in group activities--never a strong suit of mine as a child--is something I'm trying to get better at in middle-age, so I agreed. Below is my interview, questions courtesy of Marianna whose very nice blog can be found by clicking here. 1. If you had to choose one song to be in your life's soundtrack which one would it be and why? Why one? I listen to music almost constantly--therefore picking one song would constitute a form of torture as it would be playing in constant rotation, driving me mad. (Apropos of this: Gore Vidal once said "What is a long life but a nightmare of endless repetition?") But if I were to pick a song which...

A massive case of work avoidance--both screenplay writing and blogging--led to the inexcusable delay between my last posting, featuring outtakes from Gregory La Cava's "My Man Godfrey" and this follow-up post, which I conceived while writing the first post but didn't get around to for a week. Procrastination is, I think, at the heart of the blogging life--one blogs initially in order to procrastinate, avoiding the "real" tasks at hand. And then, once firmly entrenched in bloggomania (a state in which one produces bloggorhea), one procrastinates working on the blog. Enough. Back to the subject at hand, the forgotten but fascinating director Gregory La Cava. Click here to read a fine article by Gary Morris about this shamefully neglected filmmaker . I spoke last week of "My Man Godfrey", his most famous film, but several others are equally interesting and still freshly entertaining. La Cava seemed to be an early exponent of improvisatory work with a...

Having exhausted my store of "City Island" outtakes, I've taken to shamelessly plundering youtube for outtakes from other films. First up was Jon Favreau's "Made" (see five posts ago?), next was the collection of Warner Brothers 1930's bloopers (see three posts ago?) Now it's time for Carol Lombard and William Powell to swear angrily at themselves when they blow their lines in outtakes from the 1936 classic "My Man Godfrey". The question of why we still find blooper reels amusing has no sensible answer; seeing actors get pissed off at themselves and break the fourth wall is, like grilled cheese sandwiches, Checker Cabs and Lawrence Welk re-runs, one of life's inexplicable pleasures. And so to "My Man Godfrey" and it's director. If you don't know the film, by all means see it as soon as possible--along with "The Awful Truth" and "Bringing Up Baby" it defines the 1930's screwball comedy and still ...

Happy new year. As the long introductory weekend dwindles with less and less to concern us re: xmas and New Years plans (and let's face it who really cares about football teams like Arizona and San Diego?), movies become dominant once again in conversation. Nearly every social encounter reduces itself to a quick checklist of the end-of-year glut of "awards movies" and everyones feelings about them. I hate these conversations. No matter how lousy a movie is, I know how hard it was to A) write, B) get the star to commit, C) find the money, D) make the damn thing. In fact I've come to believe that movies are the hardest pursuit man has invented for himself. Getting to be President is nothing compared with getting a movie made. That said, I heartily enjoyed "The Wrestler", rather liked "Frost/Nixon", was disappointed with "Defiance" and thought "Milk" a job well done. If I don't like a movie, I prefer not to mention it. However...