Movies Til Dawn

We'll end the week with one more clip of the Lee Marvin America Theater Wing interview that I've been posting over the past few days. In this one, Marvin discusses John Ford and how he directed John Wayne, how the movie 'Donovan's Reef' came together and a trick that Ford used before shooting a difficult emotional scene. I'm digging the timbre of Lee's voice a lot as well as his hugely expressive eyebrows...   Subscribe in a reader

Here's more of the American Theater Wing interview with Lee Marvin that I've been posting all week. In this excerpt, Lee remember Henry Hathaway with fondness (instead of the fear and loathing most others recall him with) and dishes Raoul Walsh's propensity for not bothering to watch a dialogue scene while it was being shot, choosing to role a cigarette instead. Marvin also somewhat touchingly reveals that the whole reason he became an actor was due to a childhood infatuation with the movies. It's a refreshingly honest thought, given that actors of Marvin's supposed stripe usually claimed that they became actors because the pay was good or it helped them get laid or they couldn't get a job at the factory etc. etc. This was part of the generation of actors who were secretely embarrassed by their profession. But Marvin came shortly after this generation and was, as I mentioned earlier, well-bred and raised. His tone is always sincere, never self-aggrandizing and...

Yesterday I posted a segment of an in-depth interview with Lee Marvin that was conducted a year before his death in 1987. Here he discusses the legendary director (and co-head of the notorious Cannon Films) Menahem Golan, who directed Marvin's last film 'The Delta Force'. Marvin, who is reserved and almost taciturn through much of the interview, comes to life when discussing Golan, offering a hilarious impression of the Israeli entrepreneur/con artist/filmmaker. For a moment, Marvin the private citizen turns into Marvin the actor and then switches back to the former with nary a beat missed. He also tells a 'Donovan's Reef' John Ford story, during which he casually mentions a day when Ford came over and smelled Marvin suspiciously. "I might have had a couple of drinks," says Marvin retrospectively, giving the impression that this was a day of modest intake on the set for him. Don Siegel has plenty to say about Marvin's on-set drunkeness during the...

Last week I interviewed Adele Aldrich, daughter of legendary director Robert Aldrich ("Kiss Me Deadly", "The Dirty Dozen", "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" etc.) for my in-progress documentary on the legendary actor Burt Young. This led me to a  Youtube search for interview material with Robert Aldrich which I was surprised to see didn't exist. Or perhaps I haven't searched deeply enough yet. Whatever. What I did come up with, however, is a very cool multi-part interview with Lee Marvin, in which he discusses Aldrich as well as other directors he'd worked with. I can't say that he says anything terribly profound except that Aldrich clearly liked actors (this was not a prerequisite for directors in the pre-1970s era..actors were in fact used to being abused by tough-guy directors who made them feel less than manly for wearing makeup and playing make-believe for a living). "You either like actors or you don 't," Marvin says el...

Here are the first four minutes of the 1929 movie "Broadway," directed by Paul Fejos and based on one of the biggest stage hits of the 1920's which was called--er--"Broadway." The opening credits are among the most disturbing I've ever seen, with elaborate miniatures of Times Square, mad dolly moves and finally what appears to be a giant, gold-sprayed, demonic bartender walking through the set. Assuming you haven't run from the room screaming, we're next treated to the interior of the Club Paradise where the entire action of the play takes place. Once again nightmarishly garish and surreal sets are explored in nauseatingly elaborate dolly moves, finally settling down to a strange little scene where a male choreographer rehearses a few chorines in a dance that he performs quite well and they can't perform at all. "Broadway" was shot in both a silent and sound version as was frequently the case in the early days of talkies (this was b...

Longtime readers of this blog (the four of you) know by now that I have a complete lack of self-consciousness about self-promotion (a quality, I hasten to add, that can almost always be found in a show-biz kid). So it is with no humility whatsoever that I announce that the Directors Guild of America (or rather its members) have nominated me as Best Director of a Mini-Series for my work on "Madoff", which aired last spring on ABC. Click on this to read the Variety article. I would appreciate you sending good thoughts and vibes into the ether as I'm up against two HBO movies and two live musical events, all of which are stiff competition. The hell with it. It's great to be recognized by one's peers and I'm deeply thankful to mine.   Subscribe in a reader

Above is a very watchable twelve minute doc consisting of combined interviews of Stephen Sondheim through the years. You'll see young Stephen (including excerpts of the show I previously posted), middle aged Stephen (talking on the Mike Douglas show at some point in the 70s) and aging Stephen, sitting in a rather baronial and countrified room in what I believe to be his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. There are many fine moments--a young Stephen appears on a TV show with Arthur Laurents (this is around the time of 'Anyone Can Whistle' making it the mid-60s) and Laurents makes extravagant (and correct) claims for the superiority and originality of young Stephen's lyrics. Sondheim sits patiently, taking in the words impassively with not a hint of embarrassment or false humility. It's this sense of complete confidence, certainty and cool that I find so oddly disarming--does he never have a doubt? There's another nice moment where he casually mentions how helpful alc...