Movies Til Dawn

Today I've posted a fascinating look at another era's moviemaking process. Below is a short film (runs just under ten minutes) called "Hollywood Rhythm", shot in 1934 and purporting to be a behind the scenes look at how a popular song was constructed for a movie musical in the early thirties (though it is in fact entirely staged and bears no resemblance to what we now think of as "behind the scenes"). This charming antiquity is of real value because it captures on celluloid several non-actors who we would not, under usual circumstances, have the ability to have seen in person. Cheif among them are the songwriting team of Mack Gordon and Harry Revel, whose hit songs of the thirties include the lovely "Stay As Sweet As You Are" and "There's A Lull In My Life". Also captured in this mini-tour of old Hollywood is the director Norman Taurog, whose best known film is the original "Boys Town" starring Spencer Tracy and Mickey...

What do Michael Nesmith (star of "The Monkees" and Liquid Paper heir), rocker Joe ("Life's Been Good To Me...") Walsh and Fritz Lang (genius German Expressionist/American Film Noir Master) have in common? The answer is: 1501 Summit Ridge Drive, a Spanish styled house perched on a precipice overlooking Pickfair.  Built in 1936, the house was acquired by Lang in 1945,  when he was finally successful and established enough in America to claim a hilltop overlooking Beverly Hills for himself. The house is something of an oddity. It's rather grandly set at the top of three acres of descending walkways, gardens and grounds. But the interior measures a modest 2635 square feet and, according to most listing reports, contains only two bedrooms. Indeed, in Kevin Thomas's LA Times remembrance of Lang, he calls the house a "Spanish cottage with spacious rooms sleekly redesigned by Richard Neutra." Do cottages normally have spacious rooms? Are cott...

The extraordinary Dateline NBC one hour special on Booker Wright and our search for the story of his life took all of us by surprise. It's depth, sincerity and detailed examination of the case were truly impressive. Beyond this, the piece was impeccably crafted--a fine example of modern broadcast journalism at its peak standard. If you missed it click here to go to the MSNBC site where you can find the whole thing in six parts. Here's a nice article that appeared over the weekend in The Arizona Republic--a publication straight from the hometown of Yvette Johnson, Booker's grandaughter. Finally, for those of you who've seen either our movie or the Dateline NBC piece, you'll know that Lusco's Restaurant was the establishment where Booker Wright worked when he made his "infamous" speech in my father's documentary. I've eaten there several times while in Greenwood and it's a fabulous place with the best Steaks in the world. Alas, they...

On Sunday July 15th, Dateline NBC will air a special extended segment devoted to the story we've unearthed and explored in our film "Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story". This is a major bit of business for an indie doc such as ours and we're thrilled that the people at Dateline decided to do it. Of course, NBC aired the original doc that my father made back in 1965 and the producer of the segment, Tim Beecham, knew of my father's film for awhile. Indeed, he pitched Dateline on updating the film for a segment awhile back. But with the emergence of our film and the research that it uncovered about Booker Wright's life and death, the segment became a much bigger story. David Zellerford (producer), Yvette Johnson (Booker's granddaughter) and I went to Mississippi a few months ago to work with Lester Holt and Tim on filming new material specifically for this segment. My father, Frank De Felitta, also will appear in the segment. For a preview of the Dat...

My pointless obsession with movie director's houses (click here for more than you really need to know about Billy Wilder's apartment ) continues apace with the New York townhouse abode of one of the paciest directors known to man, the late great Sidney Lumet. A die-hard New Yorker who never shot anywhere else if he could help it, Lumet was pretty much half of the NYC film industry (the other half was Woody Allen) through the 1960's and early '70's. (Scorcese didn't really shoot in NYC with regularity until the late seventies). As befits local royalty, Lumet made his home in a townhouse on the Upper East Side which was--despite his proletariat personal style--quite ...well.. .royal.  Located at both 1380 Lexington Avenue and 135 East 91st Street, the house was, in fact,  more distinctive than simply lavish, partly due to the fact that it was that rare thing--a corner townhouse, meaning that it had windows on three sides rather than just the standard f...

NBC Archives has made available "Mississippi: A Self Portrait", the complete, original one-hour documentary that my father made which in turn inspired us to make the "follow-up" documentary "Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story". Click here to legally view the entire 1965 film.  We're hoping to be able to include the original doc as an extra on the DVD of "Booker's Place", along with "The Streets Of Greenwood", a fine short film made in the early '60's which we were privileged to be allowed to cull invaluable footage from, showing Greenwood Ms. in the height (or depths) of the Civil Rights era. Meanwhile, "Booker's Place" is playing this weekend at the Little Rock Film Festival where it's competing for the "Best Southern Documentary" prize. More fests to follow, I'm sure. And our Dateline NBC segment is being moved around the calendar but will soon land, I imagine, on the appro...

In 1978, when I was a Junior High schooler at the disastrous San Fernando Valley prison camp known as Walter Reed Jr. High School, our English teacher (name and face a total blank to me at this date) selected a few students who seemed to have an aptitude for creative writing to join in a supplementary outside-of-class group where they'd focus on essay writing. I was one of the lucky few chosen--I say lucky because just the fact of being able to leave a classroom filled with thirty assholes and sit in a quiet group of five or six was a heavenly thought to me. The mini-class was led by an aging--all right elderly--gentleman named Mr. Pola. And "gentleman" was absolutely the right way to describe him. It wasn't just the double-breasted suit and the worn but still elegant silk tie that he wore. He had a bearing, a gentle dignity about him, that felt to me (a kid who truly didn't belong in the world he'd been born into) as if it belonged in another era, maybe...