Movies Til Dawn

Following the uncertain reception accorded to my first feature "Cafe Society", we returned to New York--somewhat dispirited but still essentially optimistic. After al, Roger Ebert had really liked the movie. Others had too. It was as if nobody wanted to be the first to come out and say that they loved it. I sensed (and believe I was correct in this) that the finishing of the film was partly to blame--it was still overlength and under-scored musically (by which I mean NOT scored--I tried to do with period records only which is a lovely conceit--Woody Allen does it all the time--but wasn't really right for this movie). At that time, Showtime had gotten into the "made of cable" movie business in earnest. One of the ways to do this with some efficiency was to not just make their own movies, but buy already finished movies that had trouble securing domestic distribution. The movies needed to have recognizable cast elements, elegant production values and some sort of ...

"Cafe Society" was photographed across the December/January 1994/1995 holiday season. For reasons that have nothing to do with anything but managerial incompetence, the film was shot mostly at night--perhaps our initial location (the courtroom) was a nights only proposition, thus throwing the rest of the shoot onto an ungodly Six AM to Six PM timetable. In a strange way, though, the off-the-gridness of it all was part of the shoots magic--the odd task of re-creating forgotten Manhattan nightclubs on a bare-bones budget was given an additional otherworldliness by being allowed to happen only after midnight. And how did we accomplish the recreation of a half-dozen or so nightclubs on that flea budget, you ask? By finding an incredible location which in many ways was the real reason the film could be accomplished at all. It was an old "gentleman's club" in the Wall Street area--a five story building that had once housed a series of meeting rooms, restaurants, priva...

"Welcome to 'Cafe Society'," intones Frank Whaley, star of my first feature film, "Cafe Society". "Where the elite meet to eat...(and then, sotto voce) each other. " "Cafe Society" was made in 1995 and has been largely out of circulation since its appearance. Or so it seems to me. Since nobody has a clue who owns it and no one has seen fit to put it on DVD, I've posted it below. Well actually I've posted the first four parts. If you're interested in watching the rest, youtube will perform its magic. The film was based on a true crime story--the sensational 1952 scandal involving one Mickey Jelke, heir to an oleomargerine fortune, who was accused and convicted of heading Manhattan's biggest prostitution ring. Jelke was tabloid fodder for several years, especially when it was revealed that his "main girl"--Patricia Ward--had formerly been his fiancee. Jelke convinced Ward to go to work hooking when his family (who ...