Movies Til Dawn

I've posted old 'driving around LA in the retro past' videos before but here are two I've never seen. Both are rides down the Sunset Strip in the mid-sixties. The first is a sideview looking at the south side of the Strip heading east. Many familiar buildings and some not so familiar--'The Plush Pup' anyone? At 1:26 we pass the old Lytton Savings Bank with the strange little circular sculpture incongruously placed in the parking lot. (I remember this from my childhood. This neighborhood was the first we lived in after arriving from New York--my parents rented a small apartment on Laurel Ave. while searching for a house to buy and we took a walk every evening past this corner). As we get to the southwest corner of Crescent Heights and Sunset we see a bombed out lot with a bus stop in front of it. The deserted buldings have been graffitied and are of Spanish design. I believe this to be the detritus of the 'Garden of Allah' bungalows, which were much mo...

Joke: Q: How many editors does it take to change a light bulb? A: Change? I'm not changing shit. Above, see a lengthy and quite interesting Q&A with Dede Allen, pioneering chick film editor ('Bonnie and Clyde', 'Serpico', 'Milagro Beanfield War', 'Slaughterhouse-5','Addams Family', etc.). She's something of a pain in the ass but all editors are to some extent and you would be too if you stayed locked in a room watching actors say the same thing over and over with no real perceptible change in performance. The video is in four parts and if only I'd watched the whole thing I could tell you if it's all worth watching. Her work was widely considered to be the best in the business, though Sidney Lumet was somewhat churlish about her contributions to 'Serpico' being singled out--given the low shooting ratio of Lumet's films its unlikely she had much more to do then clip the slates off, something that cannot be s...

What do you do when you're a director and your longtime friend and editor sends you the above Patton Oswalt rant on how movies are actually made? Frankly I think he's got it right so I took no offense. Thus this posting, intended to share the information...   Subscribe in a reader

This blog has been silent for the last two and half weeks in tribute to my parents Frank and Dorothy, who died within a few months of each other--she in November of 2015, he in March of this year. Previously I'd been posting my fathers work--docs, trailers of films etc.--and in the near future I'll put up more stuff as it comes in. You see, he had a closet full of 16mm (and 8mm) film and I'm gradually watching it all (on his perfectly functional 1973 projector, with the image being thrown onto a white bedsheet draped over a big screen TV), preparing to transfer the material to other formats, all of which are probably less reliable than good old 16mm. All of this material will eventually find its way onto Youtube, the world-wide bin of all things ever recorded, and I'll steer this blogs modest but attentive audience to the stuff as I post it. Meanwhile, I've posted a clip from 'A Day At the Races', a film that my parents and I loved and watched religiously e...

Welcome to a hot summer evening in New York City in 1962. The setting: Bellevue Hosptial. It don't get more glamorous. We are in the "EMERGENCY WARD"--which is the name of the documentary film that my father, Frank De Felitta, shot during that sweltering summer of '62 and which is posted above. The film is a fascinating look at a single intern and a typical night in his life. Of course it wasn't shot in a single night but over a course of weeks. The reason, according to my father, was that the mandate from NBC--the network who commissioned the show--was to show an intern losing one patient and saving another. This didn't happen every night. It barely happened that summer. But after weeks of arduous shooting and waiting around and becoming a serious annoyance to the staff, my father and his crew delivered. Dr. Martin Mulnar--the young, blonde Tab Hunter-ish intern who they chose to follow--first lost and then finally saved a patients life. The film wrapped, ...

Here, in honor of my father who was a veteran of the Second World War (he was a pilot in what was then known as the Army Air Corps) is one of his one-hour documentaries that he made for NBC in the 1960s. 'The Battle Of The Bulge" aired on the twentieth anniversery of the battle and remains a stirring and dynamic tribute to (and explanation of) this significant turning point in the bloodiest war the world has ever known. The film contains priceless footage of many of the significant participants in the war, including Generals Omar Bradley and Anthony McAuliffe--the latter was the general who famously replied "nuts!" when told by the Germans that he had no honorable choice but to surrender to them. My father flew "troop carrier" missions, dropping parachuting fighters deep into the battle zones. Indeed, he participated in this battle and--astonishingly to me--wound up documenting it a mere twenty years later for national television. In 1996 at the Deauvill...