Movies Til Dawn

Behold "The Losers", a 1962 one-hour episode that aired on the anthology show 'The Dick Powell Theater'. It stars Lee Marvin, Keenan Wynn and Rosemary Clooney and was directed and co-written (with Bruce Geller) by Sam Peckinpah. It was Peckinpah's first piece of work after completing his second feature, the highly regarded 'Ride The High Country'. Unfortunately, that now-revered western had been poorly released by MGM as the bottom-half of a double bill paired with a Frankie and Annette beach party movie. Peckinpah was forced to go back to television, where he had toiled for a decade prior to his feature career. TV was not the 'thing' that it's become since--it was a definite step down the food chain. Nonetheless, Peckinpah--never one to not take his work seriously--dove back in with relish and created the above-posted very funny, quite eccentric and ultimately moving one-hour 'featurette'. I recall seeing it years ago and then not be...

When I was a pre-teen, I was given a Super 8mm camera and editing machine for Christmas one year. I was already deeply into filmmaking and wasted no time in beginning my oeuvre--which turned out to be loose remakes of Three Stooges shorts starring friends of mine from school. The Columbia two-reeler format was my bedrock of film education (for some reason). But sometimes, in between films, I'd restlessly piece together some scraps of footage just for fun--no actors, no scripts! Just me and the editing machine. I'd shoot footage of 'I Love Lucy' off the TV. I'd shoot strange, arty shots of my cat Rusty. Once I shot a piano roll playing--the slits on the paper that represent the notes being played were quite mesmerizing. I'd also grab some outtakes from my latest Three Stooges remake and jumble it all together. It was weird and stupid fun. Like I said I was thirteen. What I didn't realize at the time was that I was actually participating in the movement kn...

When I was a young man going to Bard College I took a course in the history of avant-garde cinema, about which I knew nothing. Having come from a Hollywood family that thrived on classic movies, and having already become a certified movie-geek myself, I was curious to see what this other side of the cinematic universe had to offer. At first the films confused me. Maya Deren, Sidney Petersen and others of their ilk were making their strange little films in the 1940s. A little esoteric, a little boring but worth puzzling through. Then as the work progressed I grew steadily more annoyed--Stan Brakhage, the AG cinema's saint, threw me completely with his stuff--painting on film? Really? But it was Michael Snow's 'Back And Forth' (posted above) that finally unleashed the torrents of hatred and contempt that I felt for the whole Avant-Garde cinema movement. And I wasn't alone. I recall sitting in the unheated barn of a theater that we watched these films in (the 16...

Welcome back to 'lite music' month at MTD. Today I've posted the stunningly tastelessly titled 'MUSIC TO CHANGE HER MIND', a Jackie Gleason orchestral outing. Gleason was very clever about creating and marketing these 'mood music' albums and he had about as much to do with their making as most Executive Producers have to do with the movies they get their names on. But without the Great One, we wouldn't have the albums that allow us to do a Cosby/Trump/Weinstein on women who presumably look like the above model.   Subscribe in a reader

Carmen Cavallero was, along with Eddy Duchin, the ultimate antecedent and role model for Liberace, an arpeggio-spinning, glissando-wielding, sustaining-pedal obsessed 'light' pianist. As part of my continuing education in the world of 'society pianists'--which is my planned next career--I offer this faintly absurd 45RPM recording of Cavallero doing selections from the immortal 'Guys and Dolls' score by Frank Loesser. I can only imagine Loesser's reaction to the record--though he may well have liked it as it doesn't jazz things up and thus impinge on his vaunted melodies. The Latin playboy Cavallero, by the way, was in fact born in Brooklyn as Max Calvinsky and was the son of a singing waiter on Delancey Street named Baruch Calvinsky. His mother was a seamstress named Sadie Calvinsky (nee Porchnik). And Bob' Cavallero's your uncle.   Subscribe in a reader

Ha. Got you with that tweet, didn't I? Yeah, I'm posting a Ferrante and Teichner album of the 'greatest movie love themes ever'. You want to make something of it? In searching for a new artistic venture to pour my exhausted self into, I've been enjoying 'easy listening' piano albums of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Why shouldn't they make a comeback? I don't mean in some snarky hipper-than-thou 'aren't-we-having-fun-doing-retro-art' kind of way. I mean good old-fashioned two-piano albums (must be on vinyl, natch) accompanied by lush strings, exotic horns, harps, peculiar percussion etc. I see it as a natural extension of the odd popularity now enjoyed by Michael Buble and Jamie Cullum, the latter of whom was/is a straight up jazz guy who seems to have grabbed onto a wave of populist musical enjoyment. Art is all about cycles and why shouldn't this once-popular style be revived? And if so, who better to revive it than a burnt out filmmaker...

Did I sound annoyed when I finished yesterday's post? Did I not truly enjoy making my eighth movie? The answer is yes and no. A number of well-meaning friends and readers reached out to me, perturbed by my fickle feelings about my profession and my apparently surly tone in describing (or failing to describe, more accurately) the filmmaking experience I just survived. Let me put it this way: now that the fun factor has disappeared from the work, the work factor has increased. I can't make something that is going to fall below the standards I've set for myself over the past twenty years. I also can no longer expect the experience to be a social one. More and more, directing has become a largely asocial activity, wherein I collaborate specifically with actors and a DP, with good support from a crew and an occasional (I hope) suggestion from the producers. But the party-down aspect of the whole endeavor--essential when I was a twenty-something year-old fellow--is not only m...