Movies Til Dawn

In spite of my many years of devotion to the art of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, I never took much of an interest in their silent films. It seemed to me ridiculous to watch an L&H without the benefit of Stan's strangely pitched English accent and Oliver's over-ripe, florid pseudo-Southern one. But that was idiotic of me. Thanks to Youtube I've been wasting a great deal of time lately catching up on the L&H silents and they are mostly quite brilliant. One of the strange things to contemplate is what audiences of the day may have thought the boys sounded like. Certainly the title cards make no effort to reproduce their actual speech patterns--one of the cards has Ollie saying "Give me them nails!", a contraction he would never have used in a talkie. (Indeed one can hear the real Ollie emphasizing the correct word: "Give me those nails!") L&H without their voices are really only 50% of themselves, yet the silents do manage to convey their p...

Above is a ten minute mini-doc shot on the set of "Rio Lobo", the 1970 John Wayne/Howard Hawks collaboration. George 'Paper Tiger' Plimpton seems to have done this for a TV show of some sort, as the focus is on how he's been given a small part in a scene and has to learn to both act like a cowboy and get shot to death. There's quite a bit of footage of Hawks directing Wayne and Wayne directing other actors, a not uncommon occurrence apparently. Hawks stays cool--he and Wayne had already done four other movies together--and frankly looks a little worn out. This was Hawks last film and by far his least successful reputation-wise, with "Mans Favorite Sport" brining up the rear. The final edited scene is pretty slick and its nice to see the care with which Hawks developed the smallest moments in what might have been an ordinary shoot-out in other hands.   Subscribe in a reader

What the hell was Frank Sinatra doing guest-hosting the Tonight Show on some forgotten week in 1977? Was this a common occurrence that somehow eluded me or just a freak occurrence that somehow eluded Sinatra's good judgement? He looks as comfortable behind a desk acting as a host as your cousin who sings at parties when inebriated might look in front of a crowd at Radio City. Things collapse entirely when Don Rickles appears and annihilates whatever order may have previously existed. Since the above clip is only the Rickles segment I have no idea how entertaining the earlier part of the show was, but the guests were George Burns, Angie Dickenson and Carroll O'Conner (who sits nervously through Rickles shtick, looking like a student who hopes the teacher won't call on him). What a nice old convention of the classic talk-show era it was to keep all the guests on the stage as the evening progressed. It speaks to the end of the community spirit in old show-biz land, the dying...

Above is a hilarious-to-the-point-of-exhaustion appearance by Rodney Dangerfield on Johnny Carson in 1983. More in the talk-show-a-thon which began last week with the tribute to Merv Griffin. We'll be right back...   Subscribe in a reader

Above is an incredibly precious fragment of filmed history, captured at the Times Square Theater in December of 1929. It's a rehearsal of George Gershwin's 'Strike Up The Band', apparently filmed for some sort of newsreel coverage. In it we see Gershwin play the piano, banter with the comedy team of Clark and McCullough (who were in the show, natch) and get a good view of what chorus girls looked like in the 20s. Gershwin's voice and manner is much less formal than in the other recordings we have of him and it's quite haunting to find ourselves in that darkened theater on that long-forgotten winter afternoon shortly after the stock market crashed. Unfortunately the film is very poorly shot--there are only two angles of the stage, one from up high (from the side) and one from the same side position below. Thus we get practically no view of Gershwin and the comics and way too much view of the flabby girls and their somewhat amateurish (to modern eyes) dance rou...

I know I was stumping for a Merv Griffin image re-hab and I still believe my warm words of support for the TV semi-icon. Nonetheless, Rick Moranis did a wicked funny Merv on SCTV in the early eighties. See above, with special guest stars Yasser Arafat, Loni Anderson, Lou Ferrigno and Liberace. 'We'll be right back...'   Subscribe in a reader

Above is an extraordinary hour of entertainment via Merv Griffin's show in 1978. In one hour you get Buddy Rich and his big band, Mel Torme and his voice, Redd Foxx and his attempt at singing and a pile of Henny Youngman one-liners and stories--along with conversations between all of them.  How Merv could, on a nightly basis, produce a show this packed with legends and headliners is a testement to how comfortable he made the guests feel, how smooth a producer he was and how warm the environment of his show was. As you can see from the previous few days posts, my Merv-a-Thon is bringing back warm and fuzzy memories and renewed respect for this often parodied and unfairly ignored talk-show great. Today Merv is largely known for the wealth he amassed due to the game shows he produced/owned as well as for his lavish, silly later years as a bon vivant Hotelier and for being an old-fashioned, resolutely closeted gay man. (He's also known for 'Merv Griffin Way', that nice li...

Above is a clip from the early 50s of the pre-TV talk show/game show creator/mega-media mogul Merv Griffin in his early crooning days, on a TV show accompanied by the Freddy Martin Orchestra (with whom he worked regularly). He sings a chorus of 'How About You?' and, to my eyes, hardly resembles his later more famous self. Nor does his voice match the mellifluous, amiable Merv in his syndicated prime. His tenor is forced, his mouth movements ridiculously over-played and his screen presence practically nil. It's not that he's a bad singer at all--he's simply a different person than he became a mere decade later. Below are two more Merv records: the Rodgers and Hart classic 'Manhattan' (with a very nice accompanying video of stock lower Manhattan footage) and the ridiculous 'I've Got A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts' which--God help us--was his certified hit of this period of his career, reaching number 8 on the national sales charts. Jesus...  ...

Dig the above very elaborate and more than a bit confusing card trick performed by Orson Welles on the Merv Griffin Show circa 1979. The 'volunteer' from the audience is, in fact, a plant--it's Welles cinematographer and friend Gary Graver. Plant or no plant, he fucks up the trick by setting his watch to the wrong time. Welles is sort of amused at having blown it and carries on anyway. As Welles was double the size he'd been thirty years earlier, Merv was half the size he became thirty years after this.   Subscribe in a reader

The above is a 100 year history of the MGM logo, beginning with the docile, non-roaring lion of the early twenties, moving gradually into the sound era (with a nice shot of the director and DP actually filming the Goddamn lion), pausing in the mid-50s with a 'replacement lion' that frankly I don't recognize (is it that I simply stop watching MGM films after 'The Bandwagon'?) and finally ending up with the new, 3D-friendly digitally enhanced lion that now has the job. The digital enhancement is to the sound, not the picture, and guess what? It's the worst sounding lion since the talkies were invented. Progress...   Subscribe in a reader

Apropos of yesterday's post (scroll down sweetheart) which featured the logo history of 20th Century Fox, today I've posted the equally thrilling history of the Columbia Studios logo. Like Fox, the iconic image never changed--the lady with the torch kept her job for decades, thought they did style her a little differently over the years. (Does she grow thinner with time? To my eyes the answer is yes). Unlike Fox, the music is a grab bag, with no consistent theme and oftentimes using whatever lead in is provided by the film's score. Enough...   Subscribe in a reader

Here's one of those weirdly mesmerizing 'history of a logo' videos that are a staple of a complete Youtube diet. This is the history of the 20th Century Fox logo over a 100 year period.  I knew that William Fox, an independent film distributor/producer, was the originator of things somehow but I failed to even consider that there was once a 20th Century Pictures with which he merged. You'll see precisely one logo of each before the now famous fully named company appears. The only other thing of any real interest is the fact that over the course of eight decades the theme has never been played in any key other than the original B flat.   Subscribe in a reader

Today's little LA history video is a 1965 KTLA (Channel Five on the period local LA TV dial) documentary on the building of the then still-in-progress Century City. The 'development' (as its referred to in the doc) was built on the site of what had been the Fox Ranch--all studios kept a large amount of acreage somewhere to be used for outdoor work and Fox had two-hundred plus very valuable acres of prime Beverly Hills land attached to their studio. (This was unusual as usually the ranch land was located somewhere in the Valley--Columbia's ranch was in the then rural North Hollywood and the Paramount ranch was out in Calabases). Fox was forced to dispose of the land when 'Cleopatra'--the wildly over-budget Taylor/Burton 1963 debacle--threatened to bankrupt the studio. The developers who purchased the land, the Aluminum Company of America, paid a mere forty-three million bucks and before anyone knew it the magic world of false front buildings, fake lakes, mining ...

Above is posted the recording of the song I was talking about yesterday, the ex-Pepsi Cola jingle 'Music To Watch Girls By'. Apparently the Bob Crewe Generation was the first to recognize the snappy, Alpert-ish possibilities in the song and thus we have them to thank for lifting it out of the advertising world and into the elysian fields of popular musical entertainment. Crewe, of course, was best known for his collaboration with Bob Gaudio on a pile of Four Seasons hits but he did a great deal more that you can learn about if you click on this Wikipedia article. Just so we can consider this subject safely closed, below is the Al Hirt hit record of the same damn song. Enough!   Subscribe in a reader

Staying in the 1960s pre-hippie, post-hipster window (see two previous posts) I've chosen to take on an iconic song of the era that has had absolutely no life whatsoever since. It was composed by Sid Ramin at the behest of Pepsi-Cola for a new ad campaign apparently aimed at super-horny young men and exhibitionistic young women and was informally known as the 'Girl Watchers' song. The above is a black and white Pepsi commercial from 1965 featuring the song as an instrumental background track. Below is a color commercial--quite a bit more elaborate than the above b&w ad--from a couple of years later. It exemplifies all things groovy in the era--the zoom shots of women's asses, the frank ogling of the admiring males etc. Dig: Now. The jingle was so popular that lyrics were added in 1967 and the song became a top charter for Andy Williams. By then it had become 'Music To Watch Girls By' with ultra-hip lyrics written by an old friend of my families named Tony...

Above is a brief and dull little drive through LAX in the mid 1960s. Who shot it and why? My guess is that it's stock footage to be used for a rear projection sequence in an unidentified movie.  We begin with the arrivals section, facing east.  Does the sign on the left read 'Bonanza Airlines'? Who were they? A subject for further research, that's who. It's nice to see how little traffic there was back then. At one minute we see the iconic semi-arched air club thingy that to this day hovers mid-centuarily over the airport. Once again, as with yesterdays drive down Sunset, the air looks just as dirty and hazy as it does to this day. Take two begins at 1:18 and starts a little further down. It clearly is intended to take us out of the airport, thus providing the filmmakers with a 'departures' view. Again the sky club thingy appears on the right and, after the big curving exit, we find ourselves on Century Blvd. which I'm sure you'll agree looks jus...