Movies Til Dawn

Above is a very good "Omnibus" program from 1991 on Sidney Lumet, complete with some of the footage I posted the other day of the "Q&A" read through, more rehearsal stuff with Armand Assante, and some nice on-location behind the scenes stuff. The doc is basically a forty-five minute review of Lumet's career up to 1991, with interviews, clips etc. Essentially it's a primer for those who don't know much about Lumet. And if you really want to read something embarrassing, click here for my "I Stalked Sidney" confessional, written just after the great short guy director's death.   Subscribe in a reader

Here are two invaluable views of Sidney Lumet in process. The first, posted above, is documentary footage of one of Lumet's famous 'table read-throughs' of the script, in this case "Q&A". Lumet spent two weeks before shooting his films reading the script with actors and blocking out scenes on the sets so that, come shooting time, everything was incredibly well figured out. It happens to be the complete opposite of how I work, but everyone directs in their own way and I've long admired Lumet's determination to "pre-rig" his movies. The second doc  (you have to click the previous link as the poster annoying disabled embedding) is a terrific look at the location shooting of "Dog Day Afternoon", fifteen years earlier than the Q&A read through. Here we see Lumet in action and Jesus is he in action. He runs, jumps, shouts into a bullhorn, gets angry with the extras, hugs Al Pacino etc. I don't know for what purpose either of t...

I'm happily surprised at how much 'experimental' footage was shot at (and before) the turn of the century and how much seems to have survived. Above are a series of street views of New York City in the 1890s. How much more interesting these impassive, undramatized, cinema verite segments are than, say, surviving melodrama's of the period. I myself get mesmerized watching the flow of life that for some reason was captured by a forgotten cameraman experimenting with his dandy newish device, the motion picture camera. Whoever he was, he was clearly interested in cutting edge tech stuff and possibly worked for a company--Edison?--who sent him out to shoot test footage of things. Or maybe, just maybe, he was somebody who had the foresight to realize that capturing these images on film could one day be a time capsule for future generations who wondered what the world he lived in had looked like. In which case he was correct. I can't identify any of the blocks/corners he...

For many years James Cagney divided his time between a country-esque retreat in Goldwater Canyon, high above Beverly Hills, and a Martha's Vineyard spread that is nothing if not wildly appealing. But, with a fervor that only a once poor city kid (Cagney grew up in the Yorkville section of New York City--East 80s/90s) could possess, he yearned for the wide-open spaces that could only be found on a true country farm estate. Accordingly, he bought a 700 acre spread of undeveloped land in Staffordville New York, up aways from the city but not nearly as remote as the Vineyard, and proceeded to build his dream retirement villa. The result, as pictured in the above video, is a stone house so modest that it might be more suitable for use as a kennel. In his autobiography he even brags about the tininess of the place, stating that most people "are surprised by the little stone house my Bill (his nickname for his wife--whose real name apparently was Willard...hmmm) and I live in. ...

What more appropriate way to begin a year than by complete denial of our time and place, courtesy of some footage of old New York? Immerse yourself, if you will, in this journey down Broadway--via Union Square I believe--photographed sometime in the very late 19th century. Enjoy the white horse that almost collides with the cameraman, the women with big asses, the men with funny hats. And if you know New York at all, be startled with how little lower Broadway has changed over the seemingly long but in fact awfully short last century.   Subscribe in a reader