Movies Til Dawn

In the spring of 1967 my mother, father and I went to Rome where my father was engaged as to rewrite the screenplay of a big, fat World War 2 movie called 'Anzio'. His friend Eddie Dmytryk (who he'd worked with previously on a couple of unmade scripts) was the director and was dissatisfied with the current script that he'd inherited on what seems to have been a very iffy catch-as-catch-can production. So off we went and my father wrote 'ahead of camera' (as the lingo then went) about a week at a time. What a way to make such a complicated movie! The producer was Dino De Laurentis and nobody was ever sure if the checks were going to clear, or if the checks were even going to be issued. That the film looks as large-scale and epic as it does is a tribute to Dmytryk's extreme professionalism and ingenuity. It had a great cast--Robert Mitchum, Peter Falk, Arthur Kennedy, Robert Ryan--and is highly enjoyable (it recently made it onto DVD--at last!) Above I'...

As I mentioned earlier my father had a multi-faceted career, bouncing between documentaries, live TV drama, educational TV, feature scripts, novels etc. But television series per se were not among his usual works. Thus the anomaly of 'Assignment Underwater', a syndicated series shot over 1960-61 on which he functioned as a producer/story editor/credited and uncredited writer and occasional director. The show starred the stupidly named Bill Williams as a kind of 'gun for hire with a boat' guy, a single dad (wife died? Or did she leave??) raising his pretty boatnick daughter (Diana Montford) and going after bad guys on the water. The show provided work for a lot of dependable B-list directors and actors--the B movie was disappearing and thus not a reliable source of work anymore--and the shows themselves have a nice, crisp B-drive to them. The suspense is actually suspenseful, the plots are tightly constructed and--thanks to the level of studio craftsmen who directed the...

I can't believe Youtube. Really all you have to do is ask and most of the time it delivers. But who are these people who post these insanely obscure, wonderful artifacts from dead civilizations? I don't know or care. I love you all. Have a nice day. I was searching around for any copies I might have of the radio shows my father wrote in the late 1940s/early 1950s. There are some on privately made discs that he must have requested at the time --very sturdy items these discs, but who the hell can transcribe them? I know there must have existed some tape transfers made when I was growing up since I remembering hearing some of them. The one that I remember most clearly is an episode of 'Hollywood Star Playhouse' called 'Knee High To A Corpse', which starred Mickey Rooney.  It made an impression on me at the time because I already knew it as a screenplay called "Inch" that he'd wanted to make for years and hadn't realized that it was actually wr...

It is with great pride and delight that I post the first two out of six parts of an exceedingly rare and important archival item--a documentary made by father, Frank De Felitta, called "Music Of The South". (The rest of the doc will reveal itself on youtube once you watch the first part). Photographed in 1956 in the deepest backcountry of Alabama, the film is a one hour exploration of the roots of jazz, focusing on the music of slaves and field workers. Interviewed are several descendants of slaves, who heard the nascent jazz sounds in the fields as children coming from their parents and grandparents. Even if you aren't especially interested in jazz or folk music, the opportunity to actually see and hear a descendant of a victim of "America's Original Sin" (Obama's great phrase) shouldn't be passed up. The film was commissioned by CBS as part of an educational show called "Odyssey" which aired on Sunday afternoons throughout the 1950...

Continuing to pay tribute to my late father Frank De Felitta, we come to 'The Window'. In 1952, an ABC Sci-Fi anthology TV program called "Tales Of Tomorrow" broadcast a deeply upsetting event. That weeks episode, titled "The Lost Planet", was interrupted by a strange transmission showing three people--two men and a woman--sitting in a tenement window, drinking heavily and jiving incoherently. The image appeared to be coming from another show and soon the proper programming was returned, only to be interrupted again by the people seen in the window. The broadcast of "The Lost Planet" was abandoned as the network attempted to figure out why they were receiving this image of these people. It soon became apparent that it wasn't another show at all, but a "ghost transmission", an image being bounced off a satellite (or somesuch) and that the people in the window were real people, unaware they were being watched on national television...

In the continuing tribute I'm paying to my late father Frank De Felitta, I was planning on posting the theatrical trailer for the film version of his novel 'Audrey Rose.' But while you-tubing around, I found a tribute reel for the film itself, compiled by a fan. It's a beautiful three minute tour of the story, showing the emotional thrust of the scenes and the very eerie and deeply sad nature of the climax of the tale. My father's book sold zillions of copies in paperback, spending 22 weeks on the NY Times Paperback Bestseller list  (and a few on the Times Hardcover List as well). United Artists bought the film rights and the movie was made in the summer of 1976, shot primarily on soundstages at the old MGM lot (it's now Sony). It was the summer I turned twelve and I was supposed to go to summer school. My dad took me to the set one day to see how things worked and, alas for my scholastic life, I was hooked. No more summer school. My parents generously (as...

Above is the original theatrical trailer for 'The Entity', the 1982 film starring Barbara Hershey and Ron Silver based on my father Frank De Felitta's book. The basic story--a woman is terrorized by a ghost that rapes and beats her--was based on a true case. A woman named Doris Bither who lived in Culver City, California was severely injured, molested and terrorized by an unseen force. A good number of years before my father wrote his novel (which was published in 1978) he got involved in following and documenting her story. There was much controversy attached to the whole thing as several parapsychologists supported her claims and many in the psychiatric community scoffed at them. My father believed her and witnessed several terribly strange things in her house where she would occasionally allow groups of visitors (all involved in the paranormal) to come over and see for themselves what was happening. My father's career divided into three sections. His initial entr...

Above is a rather perfunctory trailer for an MOW my father adapted and directed in 1979 called "The Two Worlds Of Jennie Logan" (the whole movie is posted below). It starred Lindsey Wagner as a woman who goes back in time and...well, watch the goddam trailer and you'll figure it out. I remember being on the set a few times and meeting the DP whose name was Al Francis. This was significant to me since I was already a movie geek and had learned that when Francis was a young man he'd been a camera assistant on 'Casablanca'. I've often thought of which movie sets--given the possibility of time travel--would be the ones I'd want to go back and visit. Obviously 'Citizen Kane'. Possibly 'Shane'--specifically for the fight scene, just to see exactly how long George Stevens spent shooting all that stuff (has to have been a week, probably two?). One of the Von Sternberg/Dietrichs would make an interesting visit and who could resist a visit to...

Above is the original CBS promo for my father Frank De Felitta's 1981 MOW 'The Dark Night Of the Scarecrow'. The film starred the late, great Charles Durning and featured Jocelyn (Marlon's sister) Brando and our longtime family friend, Robert F. Lyons. Though made for television, the film has achieved quite a cult status over the years, so much so that once, when I was at a film festival in Poland, two young Polish guys came up to me to compliment my work and told me how much they liked 'my' film. Shamefully I didn't explain that I was fifteen years old when it was made and that it was actually my dad's movie. Oh well. Yesterday I spoke with the writer of the screenplay, J.D. Feigelson. We were reminiscing about my dad and he said that he'd recently been interviewed about the movie by a horror-movie magazine. They'd told him that they believed it was the first to feature a scarecrow as the central horror figure--hard to believe given the abunda...

Below I've posted a delightful one-hour documentary called "The Stately Ghosts Of England" that my late father Frank De Felitta (who passed on March 30 at the age of 94) produced and directed for NBC in 1964 (the year of my birth incidentally--and what the hell of it?). It was hosted by the great Dame Margaret Rutherford and watching it now I'm overwhelmed by how much of my fathers  personality and filmmaking obsessions can be found within it. For although it's ostensibly a doc, the film is really a kind of fantasia on legend, ghosts and classic Hollywood spin on English romantic gothic...er, stuff. If you dig The Uninvited' and 'Rebecca' and 'My Cousin Rachel', then 'Stately Ghosts' is your kind of jam.   Subscribe in a reader