Later this month, TCM is unveiling a package of Harold Lloyd films, which will include debut screenings of some rarities from the early end of his career. I was asked to contribute some material to the website to help promote and document this Lloyd festival, and in the course of fulfilling that assignment I found […]

Last week I noted that The Hudsucker Proxy is based on Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe.  But I simply said that, flatly, and added no additional color commentary on that connection.  That was because my relationship to Capra in general, and Meet John Doe in particular, is thorny, and I didn’t want to weigh the […]

Last week I posted here some embarrassing anecdotes about my experiences as a color timer in the early 1990s—and I’d intended to immediately follow it up with a sequel.  The first post was about Even Cowgirls Get the Blues—a film I knew was a commercial and critical disappointment, and I thought it was funny trying […]

Once upon a time, I helped ruin a movie. This is overstating things a bit–my contribution to this movie was so slight that I didn’t even appear in the closing titles, which are otherwise so detailed as to run on to hundreds of names, including credits for “snake wrangler” and “additional typesetter.” But even if […]

Every week my blog postings here are riddled with errors. Most of them are spelling glitches that I would like to blame on Apple, and my habit of writing these on my iPad with the aggressive spell-check feature turned on. But in amidst all my spelling mistakes are more serious errors–like my apparent inability to […]

Carnegie Hall (airing on Tuesday at midnight—set your DVR) is an epic-length cinematic love letter to classical music from one of America’s most important, if elusive and enigmatic, directors.  It is also the movie that indirectly saved my DVD venture from premature death, and for that I owe it an eternal debt. Maybe the title […]

Like a lot of film aficionados of my generation, I went through a psychotronic phase in the early 1990s.  The terminology for “psychotronic film” had been coined by Michael J. Weldon in 1980 in the magazine of the same name, which spawned a book and eventually scores of unauthorized “psychotronic film societies” that carried his […]

Just in case my love of screwball comedies wasn’t evident from all the times I’ve posted about it here before, I’m here this week to celebrate Ralph Bellamy’s contributions to the genre. I need to note that upfront, because Ralph Bellamy had such a massive and sprawling career that you could be a huge Bellamy […]

Alice was a real person.  Her name was Alice Lidell, and the Alice in Wonderland stories are littered with genuine biographical details.  Lewis Carroll, however, was not a real person—that was just a pen name for Charles Dodgson, a complicated genius.  Dodgson was trained as a clergyman but was never ordained; he taught mathematics but […]