Here's a brief (3.5 minutes) handheld home video of Mel Brooks doing a curtain speech on opening night of Young Frankenstein. This was allegedly shot by either Rosie O'Donnell or her companion that evening, and there's a brief shot of Rosie in there. More interesting is the surprise guest star that Mel brings on to take a bow. Have a look.
Today's clip runs three minutes and I like the first half best. It's footage shot around Los Angeles in the forties or early fifties. Of special note to me is a shot of a place called Owl Drugs. Owl Drugs was located at the corner of Westwood Boulevard and Kinross in Westwood Village, up near UCLA. A lot of the comic books in my collection were purchased in the sixties, right off the newsrack at Owl Drugs.
The rest of the video is footage of J. Edgar Hoover and other Washington-types in, I believe, the late fifties. This is interesting, too…but not as interesting as the shot of Owl Drugs.
Hey, let's spend two minutes with Carl Barks, the great comic book writer-artist-legend…
To save you the trouble of tracking it down, I'm embedding Jon Stewart's interview of Scott McClellan on last night's Daily Show. I find a lot of Stewart's interviews fascinating because he's one of the few people who does this kind of thing who seems to actually talk to his guests and try to knock them off their prepared Talking Points. By contrast — and I'm not suggesting that he has the exact same job description as Stewart — Tim Russert's interview was all about Russert showing how tough he could be on his guest…and more or less challenging him to move from his prepared Talking Points to his prepared Talking Points defending his prepared Talking Points. (If that sentence doesn't make sense, read it a couple more times.)
Of the two, Stewart gives us the more revealing look at McClellan, who still seems to be the Presidential Press Secretary, only of himself. Same disingenuous slicing and dicing of language to skirt the bigger picture…same adherence to what he's "supposed" to say, despite questioning that points up a lack of logic and/or facts. People say this guy was bad as a spokesperson for George W. Bush. I think he mastered and still employs the exact set of skills that they're all expected to learn and use…and that includes the Press Secretaries who've served most recent presidents. This is what they're all supposed to do. McClellan was and is just worse than most at pretending he's being candid while denying the obvious.
I know what you've been waiting for! You've been wondering when Evanier was going to link to video of a dog setting the world record for balloon-popping. Well, wait no longer…
Every time Jay Thomas in on David Letterman's show, Dave makes him tell this story. With good reason.
Here, for those of you who have 23 minutes to spare, is maybe my favorite Buster Keaton short, The Playhouse. It was made in 1921 and it's still brilliantly clever and entertaining. Which is more than I can say for a lot of comedy made since last Thursday.
It was also, at its time, a breakthrough in the area of special effects. Early in the days of cinema, filmmakers learned a primitive but workable way to do split screens and allow, for example, someone to play their twin in the same shot. They'd tape off one half of the camera lens and film, say, the left side of the scene. Then they'd roll the film back and expose the same piece of film again, this time with the other half of the lens taped off. The images usually did not match up perfectly. There was usually a fuzzy line in the center of the image and, of course, the actors in the scene had to guess how to coordinate their actions but it worked. Sort of.
For The Playhouse and a few other early films, Keaton and his tech crew devised a way to do it better. They built a shutter mechanism to fit over the camera lens — a series of interlocking windows that could be open or closed to matte off part of the lens. It gave them a more precise fit than tape on the lens. They also worked out elaborate charts and stopwatch handling that would enable Keaton to do his motions precisely on certain beats so they'd coincide with actions in other takes.
This is all something to keep in mind when you watch the trick shots in this film. They could not edit two takes together or do parts of a shot out of sequence. They'd film the left side of the scene, then Keaton (if necessary) would change outfits and they'd film the right side. And if the two performances didn't match up right, they'd have to throw the whole thing out and start over. It must have taken days to do some of these scenes. The rest of it's pretty darn clever, too.
I remember this from the 1979 Academy Award telecast and am glad to get a chance to see it again. It's a ten-minute medley performed by Steve Lawrence and Sammy Davis Jr. singing snippets of great songs that were introduced in movies but were somehow not even nominated for Oscars. It's especially striking when you consider how few times in the last 30 years, there's been a Best Song nominee that had any sort of afterlife or popularity. Once upon a time, a year's release of movies contained so many great tunes that they could overlook ones like these…
Here's one some of you will remember — the opening to Uncle Croc's Block, a very odd kids' show that was on ABC's Saturday morning schedule for part of the 1975 season. It started out as an hour, was soon trimmed to a half-hour, then yanked completely from the air, never to be seen again.
Charles Nelson Reilly starred as a gonzo kiddy show host, who was intermittently scolded and heckled by the show's director, who was played by Jonathan Harris. As I recall, there was a loose storyline and it would be interrupted often as Uncle Croc showed cartoons, including M*U*S*H (sort of a parody of M*A*S*H), Wacky and Packy, and Fraidy Cat. The studio that produced it all, Filmation, later recycled the cartoon segments in a number of different ways but the mid-season cancellation meant farewell to the guy in the crocodile costume.
The opening pretty much tells you everything else you need to know…
Groucho plugging one of his books on a 1963 Today Show…
Back in this post, I spent way too much time talking about Penelope, a not-that-good 1966 movie starring Natalie Wood as a glamorous kleptomaniac. When my father and I saw the Coming Attractions for this feature, it looked like something we'd want to see. It had a colorful supporting cast which included Jonathan Winters, and it also had Natalie Wood running around in her underwear. Those were, you have to admit, two strong selling points.
Unfortunately, when we saw the movie, we discovered it was pretty dreary…and we'd gone under false pretenses. Ms. Wood wasn't in her underwear very much and Jonathan Winters, though he had star billing, was only in the film for — and this is exact; I ran a stopwatch on it — one minute and thirty-one seconds.
That is not a joke on my part. Jonathan Winters is in this movie for 91 seconds total. And even part of that is played by a stuntman.
Our link today is to the trailer for this film…and I think, by the way, that's the voice of Wink Martindale doing the narration. Jonathan W. is in the trailer for thirty seconds so you get to see a third of his entire performance in the film, plus most of the footage of Natalie in her underwear. I'm linking to this because I told the story and also because if you see the trailer, you'll never have to see the film. (If you insist on seeing the film, Turner Classic Movies is running it in July. But trust me: There isn't much that's good that isn't in the trailer.) Here it is…
The wrong way to cook bacon…and, more importantly, the right way…
In the sixties, if you were a fan of Marvel Comics, you were probably a member of their official fan club, which they called The Merry Marvel Marching Society. It didn't do much…didn't even march anywhere. But it did have a jazzy theme song, which was recorded for the end titles of the first animated series of Marvel heroes. Here, someone named Matthew Hawes has taken the song and illustrated it with footage from that TV show and other cartoon appearances of Marvel characters…
Here's the trailer for Kill the Umpire, a 1950 comedy starring William Bendix as a baseball fan who becomes an ump and gets mixed up in all sorts of trouble. The movie was directed by Lloyd Bacon, who went from being a gag man and actor in silent comedies to directing some well-remembered movies like 42nd Street and Knute Rockne, All American. The screenplay was by Frank Tashlin, who went from directing Porky Pig cartoons for Warner Brothers to writing and then directing movies for Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis and others. Kill the Umpire is at about the same level of sophisticated comedy and has a few funny moments. Mostly, it's interesting for William Bendix, who was good in everything he did, including some pretty rotten movies.
This trailer is an ad for a company that sells the movie on DVD but you can see it this weekend on Turner Classic Movies. It runs at 1:15 AM Monday morning on my TV so that's probably 4:15 AM on the East Coast. See if this two minute snippet intrigues you and if so, set the VCR or TiVo.
In 2000, Conan O'Brien gave a commencement speech to the graduating class at his alma mater, Harvard. Way back in this post, we linked you to a transcript of what he said. Now, we link you to video of the speech. It runs about twenty minutes.