Movies Til Dawn

Obviously anyone reading this knows that "Singin' In The Rain"--the movie--is about the talking picture revolution that swept Hollywood in 1929. Furthermore I would bet that most of you reading are aware that the project came about as a result of producer Arthur Freed's desire to re-invigorate his old song catalogue--Freed was a popular tunesmith of the 1920's and early thirties along with his partner Nacio Herb Brown before becoming a producer at Metro. Betty Comden and Adolph Green's assignment was to simply cook up a way in which to jam ten or so Freed/Brown antiquities from twenty-five years earlier into a workable musical storyline. As they sardonically comment in an essay they wrote for the MGM Script Library introduction to the screenplay of "Singin' In The Rain" (and which is reprinted in the liner notes of the soundtrack CD) "...several possible stories suggested themselves. For instance, "The Wedding Of The Painted Doll...

I'm back, having survived the shoot of my seventh feature film (and a month of editing as well). Once this blog goes dormant, it's awfully hard for me to get back into posting again. A massive case of blog avoidance sets in as the tempting notion of abandoning this now six-year-old exercise in mind-numbing, self-indulgent, self-promitional shtick-laden, showboating, "look at how clever I am about forgotten popular culture history and by the way I'm shooting another movie for not enough money and thus the need for the self-touting blog" sets in. But by popular demand (from both of you) I'm yielding to my worst instincts. Yes, let's talk about "Singing In The Rain" as not enough has been written about it. Right. I showed the greatest of all movie musicals to my eight (going on forty) year old son this past weekend and afterwards fished out a very good CD of the soundtrack. It contains not only all the musical numbers from the film...