I am still fact-checking the book about Hollywood history and lore titled Armchair Reader: Hollywood. Though more time-consuming that I anticipated when I began the project, I am thoroughly enjoying the job. It offers the perfect excuse to spend some evenings in the library rummaging through star biographies that I never got around to reading, or skipping through other trivia books, checking the validity of little-known facts and anecdotes.

READ MORE

Here’s my usual drill at TFF: travel in to Telluride for an extended Labor Day Weekend, pick up the TFF schedule on Friday at noon, lazily pour over the schedule and all its offerings, circle the rare and “must see” films that I might never again see on the big screen, come up with “Plan B” options in case I get locked out of anything, allow for guilty pleasures, and in general just map things out as best I can (which is hard to do with all the T.B.A.’s that riddle the grid – but you do what you can). This is usually followed by the Opening Night Feed and dinner buffet. And then the films begin that evening and it’s time to dive into the thick of it. How thick does it get? Despite having a dozen roommates sharing a house, I might not see some of them again until it’s time to pack up the car and return home four days later. This year, that ritual was shattered and things started off with an unexpected bang.  READ MORE

Labor Day weekend for most people means a farewell to summer and a final official holiday before the Fall season but for me Labor Day usually means “The Show” – the annual Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. I have been lucky enough to attend several of the festivals over the year but since I won’t be able to attend the 36^th annual event (Sept. 4-7) I wanted to pay tribute to it with a blog about my first visit there – The 8^th Telluride Film Festival in 1981.    

The first time I heard or read about the Telluride Film Festival was in Film Comment. I wasn’t even sure where it was in Colorado for several years but the reports of the guests, honorees and films that were celebrated there made me long to attend. I finally managed to scrap together enough money for a festival pass in 1981 when I was living in Athens, Georgia. The pass structure was somewhat different then and, if memory serves me well, an all-inclusive pass cost $350 and admitted you to all venues without guaranteeing a seat. At the time, the exhibition spaces were the Sheridan Opera House, The Nugget (the site of the town’s regular cinema which became operational in 1995), Elks Park for outdoor screenings and the Telluride community center which was a bare bones, all-purpose hall with folding metal chairs. It has long since been replaced by the Galaxy. The policy was first come, first served and you’d have to queue up early to get a good seat.    READ MORE

Yesterday was my birthday and while reading through dozens of greetings on my Facebook page, I posted a couple of YouTube snippets that just felt like me … and which I wanted to make part and parcel of the day-long celebration.  We all have favorite movies and a difficult time ranking any kind of order but when you limit yourself to the movies you’d want shown on your birthday you really learn what’s important to you.  Top of my list was THE LOST CONTINENT (1968), a bizarro mash-up of SHIP OF FOOLS (1965) and THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT (1975) that was an atypical choice even for the United Kingdom’s established house of horrors, Hammer Studios.  But therein lies its abundant charm. READ MORE

Think of a montage in a classic movie.  Are you picturing falling calendar pages, or swirling newspaper headlines spinning toward the camera lens, stock market crashes, the outbreak of wars or the mounting hysteria of an anonymous crowd evolving into a mob?

Perhaps we’ve seen them so many times, we are no longer conscious that these sequences in familiar movies were often composed with such artistry by unseen hands. Yet, if you are an inveterate credit reader of classic films, one of the creative individuals who developed these artful transitions had what is still an unjustly unfamiliar name to many of us.

Even if the name of Slavko Vorkapich (1894-1976) fails to ring a bell, you definitely know his work, especially if you happened to catch Wednesday evening’s broadcast of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939-Frank Capra) on TCM. In a matter of moments, a lively montage unfolded in that film, telescoping the overwhelmingly heady experience of Jimmy Stewart‘s impressions of the nation’s capitol as he went on a whirlwind travelogue of the sights, ending at one of the most moving, the Lincoln Memorial. Bursting with movement and rapid visual imagery, the sequence conveys the naive Stewart‘s ebullience, awe and sense of freedom once he eludes his handlers, (led by the inimitable froggy-voiced Eugene Pallette).

That was just one example of Vorkapich‘s remarkable ability to goose the story of just about any film using a visual shorthand blending wipes, dissolves, flip-flops, and super-impositions to summarize and punctuate events during films, especially in the period from the 1920s to the 1940s.
READ MORE

Every Tuesday night in September, starting tonight, TCM will be screening a diverse selection of films (23 in all) scored by the legendary Bernard Herrmann (the dandy image above was created by the Bernard Herrmann Society). As an appetizer, I’ve compiled a list of my ten favorite Herrmann scores, from radio, TV, and film. It’s easy to forget, but Herrmann was a master of radio orchestration before he created those distinctive tonalities for the screen. He had an innate sense of how to adapt his musical ideas to different formats, sounding more descriptive on the radio, and increasingly atmospheric and emotional on the screen. His work wasn’t merely music added to images – he composed out of these images, creating an organic whole that lifted the films he worked on into another level of artistry. How can one think of The Mercury Theater, Citizen Kane, or Hitchock without him?

READ MORE