Movies Til Dawn

What do we really know (or care) about the deeply misanthropic maverick television auteur,  Jack   Webb ? Mostly that he was Joe Friday on Dragnet. Perhaps that he created Dragnet as well. Some might even know that he was the creative force behind the bland and stupid "Adam-12", which he produced but didn't act in--and which bares little resemblance to the Webb-i-tude of the fifties and early sixties. And what was that Webb-i-tude, exactly? Well, in my opinion, Jack Webb was the man James Ellroy dearly wishes to be and whose personality he adopts in his non-fiction writing. The crew-cut, tough-ass be-bopper who loves jazz, hates hippies, is one with Los Angeles cops, and takes no b.s. from anyone--unless it's a blonde and he might get laid. The mix of hard-core right wing values (very LA in the fifties) and smoked-out nights staring into drinks in which the ice has melted at Nickodells...you get the idea. Webb elevated squareness and it's icons (cops, milit...

(The below post was originally published in 2007, shortly after I began this never-ending experiment in blogdom. I forgot all about it until recently, when somebody I didn't know e-mailed me thanking me for having written this piece which brought back so many memories etc. etc. I went back in the archives and found, somewhat remarkably, that people had been posting comments on it for a period of six years. Obviously the subject--old movies on old LA TV stations--seems to be one that elicits nostalgic interest from those of us who grew up in LA in the seventies. So I'm reposting it...largely because I'm too lazy to write a new post. KMA.) As I found out while growing up, one could get a remarkably full film education by watching local 1970's LA television on a black and white Zenith--while being interrupted by Cal Worthington and his dog spot every ten (five?) minutes. Indeed, I find it astonishing that I was able to acquire as broad a background as I did in movi...

The setting is a Paris hotel room in 1960. What better place to find Orson Welles during this dark period of his expatriation? His comeback film,"Touch Of Evil",  had already vanished from the radar after being dumped into wide release without a press screening and having proven to be another "disappointment" for the former prodigy. The future looked gloomy. And Welles--though he does his best to remain magnetic and charming in this interview--is clearly depressed. Indeed he is very very far from  the man who later became a folk hero to the young, underground cinema freaks of the seventies. This isn't the Merv-guesting, Kermit-goofing, Dino-roasting, Jaglom-palling, Bogdanovich-raconteuring, Ma Maison-dining sage of the seventies and early eighties. That Orson was a good deal lighter in spirit and--although always wearing his 'legend' like a burdensome cape into which he might retreat at any given moment--he was somewhat more resigned in a gently phili...