Movies Til Dawn

Blogging from European airports is always a delight, for reasons that I've never fully been able to pin down. Perhaps it's the combination of the remoteness of the on-line world with the remoteness of a foreign airport, the mid-journey lost-ness of it all, that sends me into weirdly euphoric states such as the one I'm in now. That, plus the eleven AM glass of Chardonnay which I've liberally helped myself too, courtesy of the Marco Polo lounge at Marco Polo airport, Venice, Italy. Speaking of which: here is wonderful little film that I recently ran across on the now by-now indispensable Youtube. It's basically a pitch reel by Orson Welles shot in Spain (where he then lived) sometime in the 1960s (I think mid-decade, based on Welles weight). In it, he tells a group of unidentified people about a film he wants to make, concerning bullfighting and an aging filmmaker. It sounds like an early sketch of "The Other Side Of The Wind" except for the bullfighting...

Recently I wrote about the fabulous film school education I receieved --not at the American Film Institute (whose masters graciously bestowed an MFA upon me before tossing me into the mean streets of early 1990's Hollywood)--but from staring glassy-eyed, hour after hour, at local Los Angeles television in the 1970's and early 80's. Every local station aired movies--old features, old shorts, good and bad fifties and sixties television. In the days before cable, it was possible to catch almost all the necessary-to-be-seen movies on local TV--brutally cut up and, if in Scope, featuring horrible pan-and-scan work. (I often wondered if the job of panning-and-scanning the scope prints fell to the drunks...it seems like the kind of job somebody would be able to perform while inebriated and if they were no good at it, who could say? For there is truly no such things as a "good" pan-and-scan). What I didn't realize until recently was how emotional my identifica...