Movies Til Dawn

The below is one of the saddest stories I've ever run across in the annals of show-biz. Actually it's pretty fucking sad even without the show-biz angle. First, behold the below video, a wonderful 1963 "Hollywood Backstage" newsreel that covers a party thrown by Jerry Lewis and his then-wife Patti. The theme, "Think Pink", was chosen because Mrs. Lewis was pregnant. Having previously birthed four boys (the Lewis' also adopted a fifth), Jerry was determined to have a little girl. A man who clearly sets out to get what he wants, he designed a splashy Hollywood party that would collectively, I suppose, drum up enough karma to insure that what was inside Patti Lewis's tummy was, indeed, of the feminine persuasion. Or so I suppose the thought process went. Not too much pressure for the wife, right? Jerry even served pink cake and ice cream--topped with caricatures of Jerry, natch. Present at this very groovy event are Steve Allen, Jimmy Durante, Rory...

"You've just had a train wreck, son" intones Jerry Lewis (channeling J.J. Hunsecker?) to a young imitator in a manner so chilling, so deadly, so filled with a cobra's poisonous bile (if cobra's have bile) that I'm not sure the young man has yet to recover. Certainly I haven't. And I'm only watching the video. This lovely video--homemade and probably from about ten years ago--shows a teenager named Ed who volunteers to jump on stage with Jerry and do an imitation of him. Jerry is game. The kid clearly has moxie. But his choice of material--the MDA anthem "You'll Never Walk Alone"--doesn't sit well with Buddy Love. I think the crappiest part of this moment is the gratuitous insult after the teen is dismissed from the stage. And if you listen to his imitation (he gets the first three notes out) he's actually really good. At the tag end of this brief moment of shame, I think I hear the kid in the audience throwing out a Jerry sc...

The critic and historian, Martin Gottfried, in his excellent biography of the demonic Broadway producer Jed Harris, notes that the 1920's were "times of floridity, of vamps with panthers on leashes, of Rudolph Valentino and Bela Lugosi...in the 1920's it was not so odd to view and even live life in purple." This is one of the finest--and spookiest--evocations of any era that I know of, in large part because it looks beyond the usual "gin some and sin some" party-time, Wall Street-booming, Charleston-dancing image that we generally assign to the period--the "Ain't We Got Fun" racoon coats at the Harvard/Yale game bit. Indeed there was much about the 1920's, as reflected in its popular culture, that was exceedingly dark, strangely perverse, masochistic and sadistic to a degree that it may be hard for us to understand today. For in the twenties, the lines between sex and death, booze-fueled fun and booze-fueled collapse, living life on ...

Question: Name the movie director who began his career as a bacteriologist, became a set designer for F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, and directed two groundbreaking end of the silent era/beginning of the sound era works before abandoning his film career to take up anthropology, becoming one of the world's most respected figures in that fascinating field? If you guessed Paul Fejos, you're correct (and something of a geek as well). This fascinating figure's life is worth more than a cursory glance    In addition to his varied and always distinguished careers, Fejos married journalist Inga Arvad, whose sexual resume is fascinating--she "appeared" with Hitler at the Summer Olympics in 1936, then slept with John F. Kennedy in 1941, leading the FBI to begin their file on him. She later married the actor Tim McCoy, if that's your idea of a good time. Below I've posted two clips from Fejos' groundbreaking (and long thought to be lost) film of the gr...

In 1966, the Whitney Museum of American Art settled into its new, lavish headquarters on Madison Avenue and 75th Street. The newness of the building, along with the uptown location (it formerly had been located on eighth street in Greenwich Village) and thus its proximity to the Metropolitan Museum of Art,  all leant an air of new legitimacy to the institution, as well as to modern art itself.  To commemorate the opening of the new headquarters--and generate some national publicity in the bargain--the Whitney partnered with NBC news on an hour long documentary to be aired on prime-time television. The film was intended to be a sort of mini-history of American art and its host was E.G. Marshall. My father, Frank De Felitta--then a staff producer/director of documentaries at NBC--was chosen to supervise, produce and direct the film. The resulting film, "The American Image", aired on Friday, May 26th, 1967 from 10-11 PM EST. I have no idea if it aired again--typically t...

Of all forms of fame, theatrical fame is the most fleeting. The stars of yesteryear in film are still available for us to see and--in many cases--admirer. But the theater--which, through the twenties and much of the thirties, was considered several rungs above movies in terms of sophistication and seriousness--left little behind aside from the texts of the plays and some productions stills. One must trust the opinions of those who were there as to who were, in fact, the geniuses of the medium. Broadway's most famous and beloved personality of the 1920's wasn't Al Jolson or Eddie Cantor or the Marx Brothers. It was a woman named  Marilyn Miller  and while it's possible to view her today--she made precisely three movies during the tumultuous transition from silents to sound--what's not possible is to comprehend the enormity of her popularity, her daunting and much beloved persona. For Miller, like Gertrude Lawrence a bit later, personified Broadway--she defi...

"I am just back from a weekend at Joe Cook's with Connelly, Ross, Chasen, etc. Very good time. Dinner every night at midnight, barbecued spare-ribs and the like, with a show before dinner in Joe's personal opera house. It seats nine people, including the chair in the box. I had that seat. It is the only seat that has opera glasses attached to it. It was not a restful week-end, as so many of the seats exploded when you sat down on them, but I had a good time. " (Alexander Woolcott in a letter to Harpo Marx, October 3, 1932) Chances are, if you are reading this weblog, that you will know at least a couple of the above referenced names. Certainly Harpo Marx's still thuds resoundingly when dropped. Woolcott lives on primarily as the inspiration for the main character in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's still very funny (and very often revived) "The Man Who Came To Dinner." If you've gotten that far, you probably can infer that Ross is ...