Movies Til Dawn

"Jackpot" (1975) starring Richard Burton, James Coburn and Charlotte Rampling was one week away from being completed when it shut down due to lack of funds.  The unfinished film was, according to this article , about a once famous but now forgotten actor who "suddenly wins an Academy Award".  Or was it? According to this article , Burton played an actor who "fakes a grave illness in order to cash in on an insurance scam." Directed (almost) by Terence Young--he of the best three Bond movies and "Guns Of Navarone"--the movie was abandoned due to "financial difficulties". Or was it? Here's an article that says the movie finally got finished. So where is it? At some point Robert Mitchum was involved but he split early on (perhaps the financial difficulties had already begun?) to be replaced by Coburn while all the while Burton sat in a Vodka daze in his hotel room. Or did he? In the above very nice profile on the director, Young ...

Above I've posted an incredibly creepy video. It's a tour of Vincent Minnelli's abandoned and vandalized home on Sunset Blvd. in Beverly Hills. Truly a case of Hollywood Gothic, the video is all the more creepy given the circumstances it was made under; whoever our hosts are trespassed on the property to shoot the video. I don't know about you but one of my worst nightmares is the one where I realize that the house I'm walking around in doesn't belong to me and I've broken into somebody else's home. I both admire the commitment of the videographer who captured the Minelli disaster and am appalled by his nerve. Below I've reprinted a post I did a couple of years ago about the house and its sad journey: For many years I would drive by a large, dilapidated house that sits on the corner of Sunset Blvd. and Crescent Drive--the house is angled so as to be literally facing the Beverly Hills Hotel across the street--and wonder why the hell somebody did...

The D.O.A. (dead on arrival) Film Festival continues with a few minutes of footage from the scrapped 1931 pre-"Jurassic Park" dinosaur epic "Creation." The brainchild of stop motion animation pioneer Willis O'Brien , "Creation" used O'Brien's then startling special effect model-miniatures to tell the story of a man on an island filled with dinosaurs. (Or something like that. I don't have the time to read the full Wikipedia entry . Read it yourself, for Chrissakes). David Selznick, then the young, pudgy and arrogant head of production at RKO, looked at the footage and cancelled the film, allegedly due to its expensive and slow progress. But there's another wrinkle to this tale. Merian C. Cooper, who was already planning his "King Kong" (he conceived and produced the legendary pre "King Kong" "King Kong") was behind the scenes, advising Selznick to shitcan the movie due to its "boring" plot. In...

Did you know that Alfred Hitchcock is a member of the D.O.A. Film Festival gang? (Yesterday I wrote about a new festival I'm starting, honoring unfinished/abandoned movies). Yes, Hitch had a dead-on-arrival (how befitting for him) project in the late 60s. Why this information eluded Donald Spoto, Raymond Durgent and other earlier Hitch-ographers baffles me. Above is a six minute selection of footage, with annoying French narration that I can't understand. It was called "Kaleidoscope" and it pre-figured "Frenzy" in its obsessive story about a serial killer.  It was conceived in the late sixties, after the lousy "Marnie"/"Torn Curtain" double-header. Much as Hitch broke free from his 50s widescreen/technicolor style with "Psycho", here he intended to follow the New Wave and shoot a shaggy, loose and decidedly graphic story of sex and murder in New York City. A script--or a bevy of scripts--were duly prepared and abandoned. Ap...

Welcome to the D.O.A. ("dead on arrival") Film Festival. I've long wanted to start this much-needed addition to the glut of boring festivals that litter the country (the world?). My festival would be unique in that unlike all other festivals that showcase new and exciting material, we would be devoted to highlighting unfinished films , the ones that were begun and ran into some kind of production difficulties, forcing them to be abandoned. The films can be from any era and I have a feeling there'd be plenty of new material as well as old, given how easy it is for people to shoot a movie on their phone and edit it on their computer. Yet it is this very ease that I suspect causes people to begin projects and casually discard them. Fear not, failed filmmaker. You will have a home at the D.O.A. Film Festival. We'll be showing a few of the classic unfinished debacles--the Charles Laughton/Josef Von Sternberg "I Claudius", the Orson Welles "It's Al...

As all good things do, my tribute to my late mother Dorothy must wind down. I appreciate the nice words these posts seem to provoke from both friends and strangers. I will end quietly with a song that she told me fairly recently was one of her favorites. Hoagy Carmichael's 'The Nearness Of You'. Goodbye my wonderful mom. See you around the neighborhood...   Subscribe in a reader

Above is a very charming duet--Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland performing "It's Gotta Be This Or That" with a quite clever set of special lyrics that openly mock Sinatra (who's remarkably good-humored about it). What has this to do with my mother? Well, one of the great joys in her young life was seeing Judy Garland in 'The Wizard Of Oz' playing a girl named 'Dorothy'--which was my moms name. So moved was she by the story of young Dorothy that she went out and got her hair cut just like Judy's in the movie so she could BE Dorothy. Her love and admiration for Judy Garland was life long. But then there's Sinatra. For reasons I never could quite grasp, my mother didn't simply dislike 'Frankie' (as the bobby-soxers of the time called him). She loathed Frankie with a passion bordering on the mentally deranged. She referred to him as a 'gangster', a 'low-life', and--this with a solemnity that I remember finding chillin...