Movies Til Dawn

We'll end the week with one more clip of the Lee Marvin America Theater Wing interview that I've been posting over the past few days. In this one, Marvin discusses John Ford and how he directed John Wayne, how the movie 'Donovan's Reef' came together and a trick that Ford used before shooting a difficult emotional scene. I'm digging the timbre of Lee's voice a lot as well as his hugely expressive eyebrows...   Subscribe in a reader

Here's more of the American Theater Wing interview with Lee Marvin that I've been posting all week. In this excerpt, Lee remember Henry Hathaway with fondness (instead of the fear and loathing most others recall him with) and dishes Raoul Walsh's propensity for not bothering to watch a dialogue scene while it was being shot, choosing to role a cigarette instead. Marvin also somewhat touchingly reveals that the whole reason he became an actor was due to a childhood infatuation with the movies. It's a refreshingly honest thought, given that actors of Marvin's supposed stripe usually claimed that they became actors because the pay was good or it helped them get laid or they couldn't get a job at the factory etc. etc. This was part of the generation of actors who were secretely embarrassed by their profession. But Marvin came shortly after this generation and was, as I mentioned earlier, well-bred and raised. His tone is always sincere, never self-aggrandizing and...

Yesterday I posted a segment of an in-depth interview with Lee Marvin that was conducted a year before his death in 1987. Here he discusses the legendary director (and co-head of the notorious Cannon Films) Menahem Golan, who directed Marvin's last film 'The Delta Force'. Marvin, who is reserved and almost taciturn through much of the interview, comes to life when discussing Golan, offering a hilarious impression of the Israeli entrepreneur/con artist/filmmaker. For a moment, Marvin the private citizen turns into Marvin the actor and then switches back to the former with nary a beat missed. He also tells a 'Donovan's Reef' John Ford story, during which he casually mentions a day when Ford came over and smelled Marvin suspiciously. "I might have had a couple of drinks," says Marvin retrospectively, giving the impression that this was a day of modest intake on the set for him. Don Siegel has plenty to say about Marvin's on-set drunkeness during the...

Last week I interviewed Adele Aldrich, daughter of legendary director Robert Aldrich ("Kiss Me Deadly", "The Dirty Dozen", "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" etc.) for my in-progress documentary on the legendary actor Burt Young. This led me to a  Youtube search for interview material with Robert Aldrich which I was surprised to see didn't exist. Or perhaps I haven't searched deeply enough yet. Whatever. What I did come up with, however, is a very cool multi-part interview with Lee Marvin, in which he discusses Aldrich as well as other directors he'd worked with. I can't say that he says anything terribly profound except that Aldrich clearly liked actors (this was not a prerequisite for directors in the pre-1970s era..actors were in fact used to being abused by tough-guy directors who made them feel less than manly for wearing makeup and playing make-believe for a living). "You either like actors or you don 't," Marvin says el...

Here are the first four minutes of the 1929 movie "Broadway," directed by Paul Fejos and based on one of the biggest stage hits of the 1920's which was called--er--"Broadway." The opening credits are among the most disturbing I've ever seen, with elaborate miniatures of Times Square, mad dolly moves and finally what appears to be a giant, gold-sprayed, demonic bartender walking through the set. Assuming you haven't run from the room screaming, we're next treated to the interior of the Club Paradise where the entire action of the play takes place. Once again nightmarishly garish and surreal sets are explored in nauseatingly elaborate dolly moves, finally settling down to a strange little scene where a male choreographer rehearses a few chorines in a dance that he performs quite well and they can't perform at all. "Broadway" was shot in both a silent and sound version as was frequently the case in the early days of talkies (this was b...

Longtime readers of this blog (the four of you) know by now that I have a complete lack of self-consciousness about self-promotion (a quality, I hasten to add, that can almost always be found in a show-biz kid). So it is with no humility whatsoever that I announce that the Directors Guild of America (or rather its members) have nominated me as Best Director of a Mini-Series for my work on "Madoff", which aired last spring on ABC. Click on this to read the Variety article. I would appreciate you sending good thoughts and vibes into the ether as I'm up against two HBO movies and two live musical events, all of which are stiff competition. The hell with it. It's great to be recognized by one's peers and I'm deeply thankful to mine.   Subscribe in a reader

Above is a very watchable twelve minute doc consisting of combined interviews of Stephen Sondheim through the years. You'll see young Stephen (including excerpts of the show I previously posted), middle aged Stephen (talking on the Mike Douglas show at some point in the 70s) and aging Stephen, sitting in a rather baronial and countrified room in what I believe to be his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. There are many fine moments--a young Stephen appears on a TV show with Arthur Laurents (this is around the time of 'Anyone Can Whistle' making it the mid-60s) and Laurents makes extravagant (and correct) claims for the superiority and originality of young Stephen's lyrics. Sondheim sits patiently, taking in the words impassively with not a hint of embarrassment or false humility. It's this sense of complete confidence, certainty and cool that I find so oddly disarming--does he never have a doubt? There's another nice moment where he casually mentions how helpful alc...

When Stephen Sondheim was still just a lyricist he appeared on a CBS 'educational show' and discussed how he became (at the age of not-yet-thirty) the celebrated lyricist of 'West Side Story' and 'Gypsy'. Above is the show. It's a wonderful watch as we see the young, low-key and utterly confident Sondheim begin spinning the basic anecdotes, opinion and autobiography that he's never really changed over the years e.g. how his childhood mentor, Oscar Hammerstein, taught him to write a show by mercilessly criticizing his high-school musical effort, how he hates writing lyrics, how he doesn't like his own beautiful lyrics to 'I Feel Pretty' etc. etc. The orchestrator/conductor Irwin Kostal is also part of the show and, during his  interview, goes a little postal on how much his arranging helps composers who are lazy and only give him a melody to work with (!), as well as throwing in his contempt for how unschooled new composers are and how bad r...

Here's a one minute clip of an interview with Joan Rivers in which she discusses her one appearance on the Jack Paar show and how Paar utterly failed to help her career. Forty-some years later, Rivers is still bitter about what happened. Good for her. I think I'm getting to like Paar less, the longer this series goes on...   Subscribe in a reader

In 1986, twenty-four years after Jack Paar left the Tonight Show, NBC aired a one-hour special called 'Jack Paar Comes Home'. Hosted by Paar himself, the special is a lovely time-capsule of mid-century entertainment--not just a compendium of acts but a sampling of moments and of the very specific aura and style that Paar specialized in. Paar hosts the show in much the same way he hosted the Tonight Show, casually offering up stories and anecdotes while sitting on a stool and engaging the audience not merely as viewers but as cohorts. It's an excellent way to get an overview of Paar for those of you who've yet to experience his very special brand of talk/humor/anecdoting. On the other hand, Paar was batshit crazy and would involve himself in bizarre and unnecessary feuds with other celebrities seemingly at the drop of a hat. Read this 1959 article from the Chicago Tribune on an absurd (and nationally followed) tussle he had with Ed Sullivan. It all had to do with the...

If you're reading this blog then chances are you don't need to be told that Jack Paar was the second host of 'The Tonight Show', following Steve Allen. Paar was a marvelous anecdotalist and a suave and witty interviewer of the kind that just doesn't exist anymore. Indeed, his interviews were more like conversations and mid-century America was delighted to see the famous faces of entertainment and news behave in a relaxed and casual manner. Even Nixon came off as charming and low-key in his Paar interview. (He also played a lousy piano piece). But Paar was also nuts. He was thorny, sensitive and self-important and it frequently showed in even his nicest, most casual moments. He broke down in tears on-air, carried on feuds with various other show-biz luminaries and in general acted something like a 'dry drunk'--at once seemingly clear-headed and self-possessed while also being quick to self-righteous anger and accusatory, hard-to-back-down-from stances. ...

Welcome to 2017, a year that appears headed for certain global catastrophe. Accordingly, I have placed myself on a news blackout and will unashamedly devote myself to Youtube for at least two to three hours a day. The rest of the time will be devoted to writing my memoir, tentatively titled: 'Staying Home; The Life of Raymond De Felitta'. Above I've posted a nice little mini-doc which takes us on a tour down Broadway in the early 1930s. (The youtuber who posted it has labeled the footage as being from 1930, but although some of it may indeed be from that now-prehistoric sounding year, the shot of Times Square featuring the movie 'Grand Hotel' at the Astor Theater actually dates this as 1932). We begin somewhere near where Broadway actually begins, up in the Sleepy Hollow/Tarrytown/Irvington area and proceed south. After two minutes of travels through the Bronx and below, we find ourselves at the gates of Columbia University and then travel through what appears t...