Movies Til Dawn

Here's a link to a a quite massively impressive Sunday New York Times piece about Emily Mortimer. The size and placement of this sort of piece is a sort of coronation in the NY-LA theater/film community--a kind of official handing over of the keys of the city. Show biz doesn't really get to take this kind of piece back, if you know what I mean. Once the Times gives you this nod you can be damn certain your agent is going to be saying things like..."she wants to take the summer off...this isn't right for her at all...it's just not what she wants to do at this point...I don't even want to bring her an offer like this..." You're also assured of a New York Times obituary. And knowing your life will rate a Times Obit to me makes life worth living... Further hints on my six degrees question of the previous day: Alan Arkin (who plays an acting teacher named Michael Malakov in "City Island".) briefly plucked the role of Inspector Clouseau from Peter ...

At the end of last year I was doing a little public relations work in New York to promote my documentary "Tis Autumn: The Search For Jackie Paris". Accompanying me on my round of interviews was a very nice young lady, an assistant who worked at the firm handling the p.r. She asked me what I was going to do next and I optimistically announced (I say optimistically because I had as yet not a whiff of the necessary financing) that Andy Garcia and I would soon be making a film called "City Island". Then she asked who else was in it. I mentioned a young actor named Steven Strait who (I thought it necessary to explain) would soon be out in "10,000BC"...and that's as far as I got. The reaction she had was galvanic, Beatles-like in its intensity. Words issued forth from this otherwise reserved and professional young woman in what can only be described as a gusher of gush: Can I meet him? What's he like? He's so hot. Wo, you know Steven Strait?" Y...

To begin with: please welcome the very fabulous Emily Mortimer to our cast. What do she and Otto Preminger and Andy Garcia and Alan Arkin and Woody Allen and Laurence Olivier and Lawrence Harvey all have in common? I'll get back to you on that... Meanwhile, here is the Facebook page created for "City Island". Am I too old to understand why facebook is such a splendid addition to life? Something about it eludes me, yet here I am--forty-three and posting, for goddaskes--yet happy to ride on Facebook's successful coattails. To paraphrase Truman Capote: a boy must hustle his movie. And here's a site all about the magical Bronxian place know as CIty Island. As the character played by Ms. Mortimer in the film says (or will say, once we shoot the scene): "City Island. I like it. It's sort of Nantucket by way of Washington Heights". Now Emily Mortimer I first saw in Nicole Holofcener's "Lovely And Amazing"...and of course I loved her in Woo...

For the handful of faithful readers of my weblog, I hearby apologize for switching gears from old movie and music epheremra to my other--you might say primary--obsession; the making of my own films, a maddening and utterly addictive puruit which I've been doggedly...um, pursuing since I was a kid (GAF Super 8mm camera, little editing set-up in my bedroom, the whole schmeer). And currently I have the great good fortune of beginning my fifth feature film from a script I wrote seven years ago called "City Island" . The film shoots this summer in and around New York City--and I have the honor of making the film with one of the film world's few true acting giants whose participation, support and steadfastness in putting this movie together have made it a reality: that would be the guy in the above photo, Andy Garcia. Starring along with Andy will be Emily Mortimer, Steven Strait and Alan Arkin. More about all of them as the days unfold. My plan is to blog the making of th...

Movies Til Dawn happily announces the beginning of production of its host's Raymond De Felitta's new film, "City Island". Which explains, partially, the paucity of posts which, in the post-happy blog world, (did I mean "post-happy" or post happy?) is easily misconstrued as disinterest, dis-engagement and--worst of all--pre-blog-abandonment laziness. (As if keeping these frigging blogs to begin with isn't its own sign of displaced laziness. I began this whole experiment as a way to justify the hours a day I lose on youtube watching cool old clips of stuff). Most importantly, when production of "City Island" begins this blog will transform itself into a daily diary of the shooting of said film. There will be commentary, clips of dailies and other ephermera. You will be able to follow the daily production of what is now laughingly referred to as an "independent film" (though we are, in fact, truly minus any studio and only up and going t...

Released in the first week of 1957, "Three Little Bops" was no doubt seen, chuckled at and as quickly dismissed as any other cartoon of the time--the time being the waning days of the Warners animation unit. Over the years, however, a rather sizable cult has grown up around the film and the jazz score that accompanies it--several bands have even performed the entire piece as a stand-alone concert work. And if the below links to a few different sites are any indication, "Three Little Bops" continues to live on in the imaginations of film buffs and provoke some rather provocative commentaries. The film's premise is a re-telling of the three little pigs story in which the pigs are a trio of bop musicians and the big bad wolf is a square, no-talent horn player whose greatest desire is to join their band. Stan Freberg narrates the tale with a strong bop-vocal performance and apparently provided the other voices (pigs and wolf) as well. Shorty Rogers arranged the mu...

I've written before about the fabulous film school education I receieved--not at the American Film Institute (whose masters graciously bestowed an MFA upon me before tossing me into the mean streets of early 1990's Hollywood)--but from staring glassy-eyed, hour after hour, at local Los Angeles television in the 1970's and early 80's. Every local station aired movies--old features, old shorts, good and bad fifties and sixties television...in the days before cable, it was possible to catch almost all the necessary to be seen movies on local TV--brutally cut up, yes, and if in Scope featuring horrible pan-and-scan work (I often wondered if the job of panning-and-scanning the scope prints fell to the drunkards...it seems like the kind of job somebody would think they would be able to perform while inebriated--and if they were no good at it, who could say? For there is truly no such things as a "good" pan-and-scan). What I didn't realize until recently was how ...