Movies Til Dawn

Above I've posted a TV interview with Joan Crawford from the 1960s. I don't know who the English moderator with the poofy hair is but Joan looks pretty damn sleek and comports herself well. (Sort of. The first minute is spent semi-dissing Elizabeth Taylor.) But at 1:07 in, she's asked about George Cukor and she becomes a very different Joan. She warms up and becomes very un-Crawford like in a happy and sincerely admiring way. They made four films together and the portrait she paints of him is akin to the attitude he displayed in the audio seminar I posted yesterday (scroll down for Chrissakes). He was both irascible and funny, warm and firm. It sounds like he put on his actors in a way that freed them instead of shutting them down. She says that he was the first director who helped her not take herself so seriously. No easy feat, that. Of their four collaborations, the one that stands out in both the interviews and my mind is ' A Womans Face ', a 1941 film noir ...

If you reading this blog I don't need to tell you about director George Cukor, who came from the New York stage in the 1920s, directed his first film in 1930, was one of MGM's premiere directors of the 30s, 40s and some of the 50s, was known as one of filmdom's greatest 'woman directors' (translation: he was gay), was fired from 'Gone With The Wind' because he was friends with a male prostitute who serviced Clark Gable and Gable found out and couldn't look his director in the eye (a theory, yes, but a nice one), directed at least a dozen incredibly still-watchable high-comedies, had a very famous house in the Hollywood hills,  strangely drifted off into semi-employment after finally winning an Oscar in 1964 for 'My Fair Lady', returned to filmmaking via some high-class TV movies (one of which incredibly starred Olivier and Hepburn) and finally wound up his career in his eighties with 1981's 'Rich and Famous' which contained a then...

Lets pause for a refreshing Sam Peckinpah anecdote, recounted by one of his favorite stuntmen. What is this little gathering at which this anecdote was recounted? Is it some kind of Peckinpah-veterans group lunch? The grizzled western-ish faces and knowing glances and chuckles indicate a group of former Hollywood stuntmen, perhaps mixed in with a few grips, electrics and general movie-set thugs. What prompted this was a search online for Peckinpah interview material, which in turn was prompted by watching the Peckinpah version of 'The Getaway" on the plane last night which in turn was prompted by a trip I had to make to LA which in turn...   Subscribe in a reader

I've just watched John Sturges "Bad Day At Black Rock" (or lets be honest--John Sturges and Millard Kaufman and Don McGuire's and Spencer Tracy's "Bad Day At Black Rock"--for no finished movie is anything less then the creation of the director and star and writer, or rather no finished GOOD movie is)--anyway, I just finished watching it and am having mixed feelings about what is generally regarded as a classic. But I'll get to that in a minute. First of all, why did I choose to watch BDABR on this particular Sunday morning? Because yesterday I found a very interesting audio commentary that director John Sturges did shortly before his 1992 death for a Laser Disc remastering of the movie. Apparently the commentary hasn't made it onto any subsequent DVD of the movie and it was rescued by a slightly cranky chap who has a wonderful blog containing edited commentaries by directors called "Filmschoolcommentaries". (I've posted parts ...

Richard Dreyfuss, who I am currently staring at on a monitor in an editing room, is inescapably adorable. At any age he is cheek-pinchingly huggable. (I can only imagine what his grandparents used to do to his face when he was a toddler). One of his fans has compiled a "laugh" reel (above) giving us a menu of adorable, huggable, cheek-pinchingly Dreyfussian laughs over the years. By the way, it's that very quality that makes him so purely evil as Bernie Madoff, as you will see later this year...on ABC...in our mini-series...that I'm in an editing room watching on a monitor...   Subscribe in a reader

Sometimes it's nice to give a blog a month off. Unfortunately, the silence of the past month was an inadvertent one--I've been directing the Bernie Madoff mini-series for ABC, an event that normally I would have blogged to death. For reasons that are a bit murky and not really necessary to get into, I was more or less prevented from doing this. (I'll go into details in my forthcoming memoir, tentatively titled: "Raymond De Felitta; A Life At Home"). But we had a spectacularly great shoot and I'm now a free man, happy to continue this absurd exercise in 'brand-building' and incessant self-promotion. To that end, let's look at the above posted series of Suntory Whisky commercials, featuring Francis Coppola (young, fat and beard as opposed to old, fat and bearded) and--get this--Akira Kurosawa, who apparently could belt 'em back pretty good. This all came about because yesterday, on my first day off, I spent the afternoon watching the complet...

It's Raymond's birthday and we're about midway through shooting, so Raymond has no time to blog today. Never fear, as his trusty assistants will post on his behalf. Not too much to say, just a few photos of our beloved leader Ray. Eating birthday cake on set, overlooking Central Park (and thinking of Anthony Mann?) Surrounded by his team, taking in a luxurious location at the end of the day. Holding his mini-monitor, guiding the  action during a busy street shoot.  HAPPY BIRTHDAY RAYMOND!