Movies Til Dawn

The D.O.A. (dead on arrival) Film Festival continues with a few minutes of footage from the scrapped 1931 pre-"Jurassic Park" dinosaur epic "Creation." The brainchild of stop motion animation pioneer Willis O'Brien , "Creation" used O'Brien's then startling special effect model-miniatures to tell the story of a man on an island filled with dinosaurs. (Or something like that. I don't have the time to read the full Wikipedia entry . Read it yourself, for Chrissakes). David Selznick, then the young, pudgy and arrogant head of production at RKO, looked at the footage and cancelled the film, allegedly due to its expensive and slow progress. But there's another wrinkle to this tale. Merian C. Cooper, who was already planning his "King Kong" (he conceived and produced the legendary pre "King Kong" "King Kong") was behind the scenes, advising Selznick to shitcan the movie due to its "boring" plot. In...

Did you know that Alfred Hitchcock is a member of the D.O.A. Film Festival gang? (Yesterday I wrote about a new festival I'm starting, honoring unfinished/abandoned movies). Yes, Hitch had a dead-on-arrival (how befitting for him) project in the late 60s. Why this information eluded Donald Spoto, Raymond Durgent and other earlier Hitch-ographers baffles me. Above is a six minute selection of footage, with annoying French narration that I can't understand. It was called "Kaleidoscope" and it pre-figured "Frenzy" in its obsessive story about a serial killer.  It was conceived in the late sixties, after the lousy "Marnie"/"Torn Curtain" double-header. Much as Hitch broke free from his 50s widescreen/technicolor style with "Psycho", here he intended to follow the New Wave and shoot a shaggy, loose and decidedly graphic story of sex and murder in New York City. A script--or a bevy of scripts--were duly prepared and abandoned. Ap...

Welcome to the D.O.A. ("dead on arrival") Film Festival. I've long wanted to start this much-needed addition to the glut of boring festivals that litter the country (the world?). My festival would be unique in that unlike all other festivals that showcase new and exciting material, we would be devoted to highlighting unfinished films , the ones that were begun and ran into some kind of production difficulties, forcing them to be abandoned. The films can be from any era and I have a feeling there'd be plenty of new material as well as old, given how easy it is for people to shoot a movie on their phone and edit it on their computer. Yet it is this very ease that I suspect causes people to begin projects and casually discard them. Fear not, failed filmmaker. You will have a home at the D.O.A. Film Festival. We'll be showing a few of the classic unfinished debacles--the Charles Laughton/Josef Von Sternberg "I Claudius", the Orson Welles "It's Al...

As all good things do, my tribute to my late mother Dorothy must wind down. I appreciate the nice words these posts seem to provoke from both friends and strangers. I will end quietly with a song that she told me fairly recently was one of her favorites. Hoagy Carmichael's 'The Nearness Of You'. Goodbye my wonderful mom. See you around the neighborhood...   Subscribe in a reader

Above is a very charming duet--Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland performing "It's Gotta Be This Or That" with a quite clever set of special lyrics that openly mock Sinatra (who's remarkably good-humored about it). What has this to do with my mother? Well, one of the great joys in her young life was seeing Judy Garland in 'The Wizard Of Oz' playing a girl named 'Dorothy'--which was my moms name. So moved was she by the story of young Dorothy that she went out and got her hair cut just like Judy's in the movie so she could BE Dorothy. Her love and admiration for Judy Garland was life long. But then there's Sinatra. For reasons I never could quite grasp, my mother didn't simply dislike 'Frankie' (as the bobby-soxers of the time called him). She loathed Frankie with a passion bordering on the mentally deranged. She referred to him as a 'gangster', a 'low-life', and--this with a solemnity that I remember finding chillin...

Nothing pleased my late mother Dorothy more than an Astaire-Rogers movie. Everything about the 30s RKO musicals in which the duo starred seemed to add up to the ultimate in comfort food for my mom. She had a depression-era baby's enchantment with the wealthy and stylish world portrayed in the films--why was it that the poor were so OK with watching the so-called rich and carefree on the screen? She also had a real dislike of anything in movies that reeked of 'important' subject matter that traded in tragedy--no movies about sick children or Jews in the Ghetto allowed! Once, when she was  a child, her parents took her to the Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side to see a play which she remembered being titled "The Black Hole". The way she recounted it, it was the most tragic, dark, hopeless, depressing and overwhelmingly negative drama ever created. For years, when I'd suggest we watch a movie and she'd respond eagerly, I'd suggest we watch "The...

Today's tribute to Dorothy Helene Gilbert De Felitta takes us to Carnegie Hall in 1938. That was the year of the famous (infamous?) Benny Goodman concert that brought jazz to the hallowed (hollowed?) walls of the vernerable (vulnerable?) concert hall. The Goodman concert is, of course, legendary for its "Sing Sing Sing" performance. The fact that it was recorded was also something quite out of the ordinary--live recordings were not yet part of the aural culture, though you could hear live remote broadcasts of bands on the radio. Though my mom wasn't in attendance, the concert was a life-changing event for people invested in the art of the jazz of that time--which she most certainly was (she actually put together a school newspaper about music called "Swing Of The Month"--somewhere deep in the closets of my parents house lay a few copies that I must unearth and preserve). Part of what my mom conveyed to me was that the recordings made of the Carnegie Hall ...

My mother adored--no, worshipped --Billie Holliday. As a child growing up in the Bronx, her idea of a show-biz escape to a better life was tied to the notion of being a popular singer and Billie Holliday was, at that time, not necessarily the most popular but the most hep, the beyond coolest of all singers, the one that kids who really know their shit would want to emulate. The above recording of "The Very Thought of You" was one of her favorites. It was made in the fall of 1938, so my mom would have been ten years old when she heard it. I'm not sure how she was hearing these things--radios didn't yet broadcast records (they only allowed live music at that time) so either she bought records or her friends did and they squirreled them away in strange and forgotten closets in the tiny Bronx apartments they were growing up in. This was the Billie of the 'small groups', the pre-'God Bless The Child' Billie, the singer with, as yet, not a whit of social ...

My mother passed away yesterday, age 87. This means she was born in 1928, which means that if she happened to be a teenager who hung out in jazz clubs on 52nd street, the years would have been around the mid to late 1940s. And that's who she was and what she did! She grew up in the Bronx but got hip (or 'hep' as the word was then pronounced/spelled) to jazz at a young age. She and a friend would take the subway to 'the street'--then the jazz haven of the world--and go to places like The Onyx, or The 'Famous Door or (she always mentioned this one in particular) The Spotlite (note the spelling--not incorrect). The jazz of that era--the big-bands and the small groups--were her thing and she somehow imparted her love of this music to me without ever playing it for me or forcing me to listen to it . How is that possible? I will go to the end of my days without an answer to that baffling question. Above is the great (and under appreciated) tenor sax player Don Byas...

From 1934, here's "What's The Reason I'm Not Pleasing You". My mother performed this song at a talent show in the Bronx circa 1938. I post this for personal reasons best left unexpressed at this point.   Subscribe in a reader