On a recent episode of his Discovery Channel travel/food show, NO RESERVATIONS, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain referred to himself as “a total egg slut” – meaning he loves eggs, he would do almost anything to have them, possess them, devour them.  While I’m not hep to that step (I like eggs okay, but mostly dressed as pancakes) I can dig it, the slut part anyway.  I’m a total monster slut and a postage stamp slut to boot.  I collected the latter as a kid, kept an album for a while, but didn’t stay with the passion of philately; as for the former, by now you should be all too familiar with my tastes.  Monsters are a part of my life, woven into the fabric, dyed in the wool.  But when monsters appear on postage stamps… toss me a harp and call it Heaven. READ MORE

Everybody’s talking about the Rondos these days – and when I say “everybody,” I mean really just a few people.  But you have to remember, my world of MonsterKids and Horrorfans is a very small subset of society in general, so while we represent the slimmest sliver of the world’s human population, amongst weirdos we are many.  Given those parameters, I’m being dead sincere if entirely figurative when I say that everyone is talking about the Rondos right now because it is, after all, awards season.  And Rondo is, after all, an award. READ MORE

Commenting on Morlock Moirafinnie’s marvelous article on Brasher Doubloon, our favorite reader Al Lowe made a remark about the talent of Darryl F. Zanuck. One of the old-style studio moguls from the Golden Age, Zanuck was named chief of production at Warner Bros. before cofounding 20th Century Pictures and serving as chief of production at 20th Century Fox.  Unlike other moguls, such as Louis B. Mayer or Harry Cohn, Zanuck got intimately involved with certain films as a producer. In addition, he was a writer, and he had a fair understanding of editing.  Zanuck was not a particularly nice man (he had little respect for Marilyn Monroe and treated her unkindly), but he epitomized the classic-era movie producer who understood each stage in the filmmaking process. He brought that knowledge to the table on all the projects he supervised; his films were a near-perfect integration of the talents of the director, screenwriter, actors, and editor.

 Al’s comment reminded me of the Ford at Fox DVD box set, a massive 24-film collection of John Ford’s work at Fox Films and then 20th-Century Fox. Last summer and fall, I took two film seminars based on this collection with a wonderful instructor named Michael Smith. And, one of the running conversations in the class was the clash between Ford and Zanuck during the postproduction of some of the great director’s films. Zanuck tinkered with several of Ford’s films, often over Ford’s loud objections. Typically, in the studio system during the Golden Age (roughly 1934 to 1952, give or take a year or two), any producer had creative and financial control over any director, no matter how respected the director may have been, so in a dispute, the producer had the final word – or in the parlance of the film industry, final cut. 

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File this under: Better late than never.

Tonight I dislodged from a thick file of other papers a single newspaper page that I had slipped out from a complimentary issue of the Los Angeles Times distributed at a newspaper rack in Park City, Utah, at the Sundance Film Festival. It’s dated Thursday, January 15, 2009 – the opening day of the festival. Front page of section B1 was the announcement of Patrick McGoohan’s death. Back section, B4; the announcement of Ricardo Montalban’s death. Both lived full lives and reached ripe old ages, so it’s not like this should be hitting me like the death of John Lennon did – which is to say; they were not tragically stolen from us all while only halfway through the game. But still, there I was… feeling like some part of my childhood had suddenly evaporated. Am I the only one who thinks it’s a bit weird that two iconic actors who were stuck on islands should escape us within a day of each other? READ MORE

Not all Oscar nominations are for big budget, prestigious studio pictures like Ben-Hur (1959), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and Gone With the Wind (1939), and we’re here to offer further proof, as we did in Part 1 of this blog (which covered 1992-1960), that sometimes flukes and unexpected surprises can and do occur. If a poverty row studio like PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation) can break into the honored inner circle with Academy Award nominations for a tough little no-budget crime drama like WHY GIRLS LEAVE HOME (1945), anything can happen.

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I got a hold of some bad cheese yesterday.  Not spoiled cheese or tainted cheese, just bad cheese.  Inferior.  Inadequate.  Un-good.  It was a mild cheddar, the in-store variety (on sale).  Now,  I’ve had mild cheddar before and liked it and this particular store’s in-house sharp cheddar is pretty good but this, ugh, this abomination was a spongy, glomulous (okay, I made that word up but it freaking fits!) confabulation that couldn’t even be properly sliced off the brick without the slices being crushed under the weight of the thinnest of knives so that I was left not with individual rectangles of cheese but rather amorphous globs that looked unattractive, like a poseable Pokey figure that had been melted in a microwave.  And the taste -  taste-less would be the appropriate word in this setting… leading me to proclaim in my outside voice “This cheese tastes like synthetic flesh.  Who made this cheese… Preston Foster?” READ MORE

Continuing what I started last week, here are some more interesting biographical performances which caught Oscar’s eye.  The list is almost never-ending; the lure to portray historical figures is obviously irresistible, and you have to admit that actors give it their all.  What we’re seeing here to the left is Yul Brynner as King Mongkut of Siam in the musical The King and I, a role he originated on Broadway opposite Gertrude Lawrence and then transferred to the screen with a new Mrs. Anna played by Deborah Kerr.  Both Brynner and Kerr were nominated in the lead acting category in 1957, but only Yul went home with the statuette.  As you can see, Brynner was certainly a romanticized version of Mongkut (who had also been played by Rex Harrison in the non-musical Anna and the King opposite Irene Dunne some years earlier), but a truly yummy one!

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This is the promising voice-over one hears at the beginning of what may be the least known cinematic adaptation of one of Raymond Chandler‘s Philip Marlowe stories.  Made into a Michael Shayne mystery starring Lloyd Nolan in 1942′s Time To Kill, the author, still peeved at his story’s treatment in that decent, if workmanlike version and further miffed that he had no more income from any other movies made by the studio that owned the rights to the story, 20th Century Fox reportedly hoped to cash in on the ‘craze’ for crime stories set in the still exotic environs of a dark tinted Los Angeles following the great popularity of such films as Murder, My Sweet and The Big  Sleep.

George Montgomery, at 30, was one of the youngest actors cast to play the character in the movies, is seen in this opening scene approaching an ominously photographed mansion buffeted by the dry, swirling Santa Ana winds pushing the gnarled trees that surround the house against the walls. As he approaches the door, a sylph-like figure admits him into the house, swallowing him up in the same way that this movie seems to have been subsumed in a cinematic vault.

Never having been issued commercially on dvd and only broadcast rarely to the best of my knowledge, I was eager to see this movie when a friend recently lent it to me. In this case, The High Window, Chandler‘s third novel, published  in 1942, was fashioned by the stylish director John Brahm and his scenarists Dorothy Bennett and Leonard Praskins into a 72 minute dash through various film noir motifs and presented to a waiting public in the form of 20th Century Fox’s The Brasher Doubloon (1947). You have some of the same atmospheric elements of the other popular movies made from Chandler‘s novels in that period. Actually, after watching this movie recently, I started to wonder if the filmmakers at 20th Century Fox got together around this time to put together a film noir kit with ingredients that should have resulted in a memorable classic. Perhaps this hypothetical film noir kit might have been planned out neatly at a few production meetings that might have gone something like this…

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