Movies Til Dawn

Lets pause for a refreshing Sam Peckinpah anecdote, recounted by one of his favorite stuntmen. What is this little gathering at which this anecdote was recounted? Is it some kind of Peckinpah-veterans group lunch? The grizzled western-ish faces and knowing glances and chuckles indicate a group of former Hollywood stuntmen, perhaps mixed in with a few grips, electrics and general movie-set thugs. What prompted this was a search online for Peckinpah interview material, which in turn was prompted by watching the Peckinpah version of 'The Getaway" on the plane last night which in turn was prompted by a trip I had to make to LA which in turn...   Subscribe in a reader

I've just watched John Sturges "Bad Day At Black Rock" (or lets be honest--John Sturges and Millard Kaufman and Don McGuire's and Spencer Tracy's "Bad Day At Black Rock"--for no finished movie is anything less then the creation of the director and star and writer, or rather no finished GOOD movie is)--anyway, I just finished watching it and am having mixed feelings about what is generally regarded as a classic. But I'll get to that in a minute. First of all, why did I choose to watch BDABR on this particular Sunday morning? Because yesterday I found a very interesting audio commentary that director John Sturges did shortly before his 1992 death for a Laser Disc remastering of the movie. Apparently the commentary hasn't made it onto any subsequent DVD of the movie and it was rescued by a slightly cranky chap who has a wonderful blog containing edited commentaries by directors called "Filmschoolcommentaries". (I've posted parts ...

Richard Dreyfuss, who I am currently staring at on a monitor in an editing room, is inescapably adorable. At any age he is cheek-pinchingly huggable. (I can only imagine what his grandparents used to do to his face when he was a toddler). One of his fans has compiled a "laugh" reel (above) giving us a menu of adorable, huggable, cheek-pinchingly Dreyfussian laughs over the years. By the way, it's that very quality that makes him so purely evil as Bernie Madoff, as you will see later this year...on ABC...in our mini-series...that I'm in an editing room watching on a monitor...   Subscribe in a reader

Sometimes it's nice to give a blog a month off. Unfortunately, the silence of the past month was an inadvertent one--I've been directing the Bernie Madoff mini-series for ABC, an event that normally I would have blogged to death. For reasons that are a bit murky and not really necessary to get into, I was more or less prevented from doing this. (I'll go into details in my forthcoming memoir, tentatively titled: "Raymond De Felitta; A Life At Home"). But we had a spectacularly great shoot and I'm now a free man, happy to continue this absurd exercise in 'brand-building' and incessant self-promotion. To that end, let's look at the above posted series of Suntory Whisky commercials, featuring Francis Coppola (young, fat and beard as opposed to old, fat and bearded) and--get this--Akira Kurosawa, who apparently could belt 'em back pretty good. This all came about because yesterday, on my first day off, I spent the afternoon watching the complet...