Movies Til Dawn

Here's an interesting and oddly moving film, courtesy of AT&T, about the last three places in America that still used a telephone 'central' to connect calls, rather than the automatic system that had become the norm in the rest of the country decades earlier . It turns out that as late as 1978, people on Catalina Island, Virginia City and St. Ignace (Michigan) still picked up the phone--in some cases hand-cranked it--and spoke to the local central operator, requesting she place their phone call. This methodology harkens back to the earliest days of the telephone and was responsible for cultural references such as the song posted below ('Hello Central, Give Me Dr. Jazz', performed by Jelly Roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers). I particularly like the fellow at 3:30. His name is Jack Flanagan and he's the country assessor of Virginia City. He hand-cranks his phonebox and asks 'Marcella' to connect him to the Sheriff. In fact, phone numbers were barel...

The remote control was a substantial innovation in the development of the couch potato, allowing slovenly drunks and bored children to stare vacantly at the television set without the need of getting up to change the channel. (And what a television. The console looks like it weighs a few-hundred pounds.) The remote control is a remarkable device that has yet to be improved upon and to this day remains essential to all stoners, depressives and brain-dead victims of the workforce unemployment rate. My father used to refer to it as the 'plunger'--because of the physical motion of plunging ones thumb down in order to activate its features? Or perhaps because it plunged one further down into the well of oblivion that, lets face it, most TV programming has disappeared into. Shows with titles like "My Mom Is A Whore" and "Do You Poop Enough?" are now the norm--and I'm not making those up. But even back in the innocent times pictured in the above instructional...

What happened to the massive cassette tapes pictured in the above posted RCA promotional film about the 'revolution in tape?' Huge consoles seemed to hold four of these biggies which required no threading--imagine! It's easy to be amused by dead technology (see previous handful of posts) but this one is a real puzzler. Did it ever take off at all? Was it such a non-starter that the tapes were all destroyed? Or is there some audio-geek out there who specializes in collecting these massive RCA tapes and perhaps has even restored one of those boss consoles on which to play them? I'm quite certain there is and perhaps he's even produced a mind-numbingly boring Youtube video (that I just haven't found yet) demonstrating the process of restoring and playing these things.   Subscribe in a reader

Stereos were once an incredibly important bookshelf-filling music-delivery system. Much time was lavished on discussions of which were the best components, whether it was better to have an all-in-one receiver or a power amp, pre-amp and tuner, which massive speakers to buy (and how many). A true stereo-head preferred to listen through headphones in any case so why bother with those massive JBL's? Above is a 1978 commercial for a Sansui stereo that stars, I believe, my Junior High School 'Health' teacher. As I recall, the textbook for that now long-defunct class was from 1960 and featured, among other anachronisms, grooming tips that included the proper way to grease your hair. The caption underneath the dorky kid from a 'Leave It To Beaver' episode is burned forever in my memory: "Oil on the hairshaft provides attractive sheen and luster!"   Subscribe in a reader

Enjoy a two-minute ad for the then brand-new 1977 IBM 5100, a fifty-pound computer that appears to have been invented to help people figure out what to do with their cows (you have to watch it). By the way: is she holding an I-Pad in that opening scene? Or, more likely, is this the commercial that put the idea of the I-Pad in the then pre-teen Steve Jobs mind?   Subscribe in a reader

The above makes no sense. Yesterday I posted a 1927 instructional film on how to use a rotary phone.  (Moron that I am, I just mistakenly deleted yesterdays post whilst attempting to re-link it. The 1927 film is now posted below. 'Whilst'?) From the above instructional film (on how to dial a phone) it would appear that Bell Telephone somehow didn't convert from the operator saying "numbah-pleeze" to the rotary phone for another twenty-six years. Is this possible? Was the 1927 attempt somehow foiled and people had to wait another twenty-six years for this fabulous moment of progress to happen? ('Foiled'?) Or were people in 1954 as puzzled--or perhaps retarded is the better word--as to how to use a phone as people in 1927 were? What the hell is going on here???   Subscribe in a reader

Dig Lionel Hampton, age 18, playing the drums in a mixed-race band (the first ever filmed?) in the above clip from the 1929 RKO film "The Delightful Rogue". The song, performed by Rita Le Roy (a name that sounds like its straight out of "Singing In the Rain"), is called "Gay Love" and was written by a young Oscar Levant and Sidney Clare. (The young Levant made a cameo last week in this blog when he appeared playing piano behind Hal Skelly in the clip where Skelly goes nuts while singing to his ex-wife). There's no mistaking it--the drummer is Hamp all the way. The impish and joyously ambidextrous showman is already on display and the editor seemed to delight in his antics as he keeps cutting back to him, giving the young unknown more screen time than you'd expect. Starring along with Le Roy was the wonderfully (and absurdly) named silent star Rod La Rocque (which sounds like the name of a silent movie star in an episode of 'The Flinstones...

"Vogues Of 1938" (also known as "Walter Wanger's Vogues Of 1938", after the eponymous producer whose name not only didn't mean much of anything to the moviegoing public but may well have been a factor in the film having the rare distinction of being a depression-era musical that actually lost money according to this Wikipedia entry --STOP ME!!)... Anyway, where was I? "Walter Wanger's Vogues of 1938" was actually made in 1937, which may have been another contributing factor to its financial failure. After all, who wants to see a movie that doesn't even know what year it was made in? Perhaps the fact that it was named after the following year caused people to stay away from the theaters, assuming that it would be there next year (which, after all, is understandable given that the movie was named after the following year. Jesus, how do I stop this rant?) As musicals go, it would seem to have left no mark whatsoever on film history. Walt...

Re: my friend Marc Myers wonderful weekend post delving into the popular late 50s dance known as the Madison, above is a modified version from Jean-Luc Godard's 'Band of Outsiders'. Go here to experience Marc's smorgasbord of Madison recordings. I'll repost the best of them below--it's an early 60s German TV show hosted by the Rhineland's Dick Clark. Dig: And this just in from Marc, literally as I was finishing the post. The hip spin from the Ray Bryant combo.   Subscribe in a reader

Above is a typically smooth and interesting Charlie Rose interview with Robert Altman. This was broadcast in conjunction with the release of 'The Player' and displays Altman's dry wit and occasionally discursive method of discussion and analysis--he was one of the those guys who insists that nothing in film is worth analyzing and then proceeds to talk a blue streak analyzing everything. I met him at the Deauville Film Festival in 2000 and was delighted to spend a couple of evenings in his and his charming wife Kathryn's presence. Dino De Laurentis was being honored at the festival and Altman--who was famously fired by De Laurentis at some point in the past--was asked over dinner if he was going to attend the De Laurentis party that evening. "No thanks," he replied with a thin smile. "I've already been to the De Laurentis party."   Subscribe in a reader

Yesterday's view of New York in the early 1930s whetted my appetite for some more vintage Broadway stuff from the era. Fortunately one doesn't have to look too hard to find examples, thanks to the glut of stage material transferred to film in the first few years of the talkies. Above I've posted the full version of the film 'The Dance Of Life', a fascinating relic from 1929 derived from 'Burlesque', a popular play of the era. It stars Hal Skelly and Nancy Carroll as two vaudevillians who meet, dance, marry, break up (when fame comes to him) all the while enduring his drunken escapades and her romance with another man. Pretty typical stuff of the time but I'm always fascinated by early talkies as they seem to bring the period to life in ways that films made just a little bit later don't. This has to do, I suspect, with the clumsiness of the technology then deployed by filmmakers, which led actors to perform with a strange lack of polish. All filmmak...

Above I've posted a real weirdie. It's stock footage of West 52nd street shot sometime in the early 1930s. It has no discernible point or reason for existence. Unlike normal stock, there is little that is simply caught. Rather it is mostly staged shots of restaurant and speakeasy tasks--a guy taking a long time to hang up a coat (complete with inserts of the coat hanger), a view of a restaurant kitchen at work, a shot of a well-to-do couple being shown menus by a waiter. The location seems to largely be the 21 Club, though perhaps even that's staged. All in all it is puzzling at its worst and mesmerizingly boring at its best. (Is there anyone else out there in the world that finds spacing out on old footage like this--or the previous couple of NYC posts --wildly, stupidly entertaining? A friend of mine wrote me that watching the footage I posted last week was like watching 'paint dry'. Fair enough. But the boringness of that footage pales by comparison with this ...

Yesterday I posted a delightfully impassive look at the corner of Broadway and 88th street in 1971 as filmed by one Nicholas West. Today comes part two in Mr. West's all too small ouvre. This is an experimental stop-motion film (shot on Super 8mm) he made of a walk around Central Park in the winter of 1977. In just over three minutes, "walking" at a pace of 68 MPH, Mr. West takes us from the Upper West Side beginning on 86th and Broadway, heads east toward Central Park, then south on Central Park West, making the U-shaped loop that takes us east on Central Park South and north on Fifth Avenue (crossing the street so as to have the park across from us). The journey ends on Fifth and 86th. Enjoy this brisk winters walk and join me in saluting this most underrated (if rated at all?) New York filmmaker who, apparently, is out there somewhere posting these fine nuggets of New York City history on the tube that's made for me and you.   Subscribe in a reader

Let's take a trip back to 1971 and hang out on the northern mid-block pedestrian island on Broadway and 88th street. One day in that distant, Nixonian, Vietnammish, Laugh-In-soaked year, a fellow named Nicholas West took his camera (8mm? can't tell) and set up in that location for a little pointless people and car watching. As with all old seemingly pointless voyeuristic street footage, it turns out to be a far more valuable document of its time than, say, some narrative feature that did location work in the area but primarily focused on a story that no longer resonates starring actors that are either now forgotten or now remembered for better things. I love the older Upper West Siders who still sport Fedoras, the views of the New Yorker Theater (a snooty-ass foreign film dive as can be gleaned by the bill currently playing) and the slow and clearly pre-determined pan (at 3 minutes) to a perfect of-the-era 'peace sign' drawn on the island's side. A few nice shots ...