medusamorlock
Back in the dinosaur days before TIVO and VCRs, film lovers had to set their alarms to wake up in the middle of the night to catch their favorite classics on TV. And you really had it bad if you skipped school to watch a mid-day movie on TV, but we all did it. I did, too. I definitely recall missing a day of junior high to watch Danny Kaye's The Court Jester - and it was time well spent, indeed. After a childhood filled with marvelous (and incessant) movie-watching in theaters and on TV in Los Angeles, where we had a terrific selection of channels showing movies at all hours, I knew what I wanted to do for a living. Not make movies, but present them on TV, in interesting ways. And then, after a long and mostly delightful career in television programming at both the leading independent station in L.A. and then in cable TV at several major entertainment networks, I find myself a viewer again, able to enjoy movies as fun and art and not primarily as a means of attracting an audience. (Although, I must say, I always programmed with the eye of a film and TV lover.)

My personal favorites are classic comedy, actually classic anything, science fiction, weird movies, all the usual good and important movies and most everything else, too. Some of the movies and people I can watch over and over again, anytime: Shadow of a Doubt, Bonnie and Clyde, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a good Hope & Crosby Road pic, The Best Years of Our Lives, any Ray Harryhausen movie, early Marx Brothers, anything with adorable Robert Benchley, Eddie Cantor during the Goldwyn years, Ronald Colman, Fredric March, the aforementioned Danny Kaye...man, I gotta get out more!
Posts by medusamorlock

I really wanted to contribute something to this Halloween blogfest, so I offer a little nonsensical coda about a movie I’m sure a lot of us have seen many times and probably enjoy.  Funny + spooky has been a movie tradition forever, and nobody did it quite as well as the limber-limbed and rubber-faced actor/comedian Don [...]

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Kevin Lee of the Keyframe Blog at Fandor, the subscription internet video service, is holding an important event this week — “The Maddin-est Blogathon in the World” – celebrating the dazzling idiosyncratic Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin. I had to put my two cents in.  Especially after a very hot and sultry Florida summer, thinking about the [...]

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As we’ve seen this past week on our Blondell Blog-a-thon, Miss Joan Blondell was a survivor.  Through her long movie career she always managed to come out on top, and her image as a plucky dame was one that audiences cherished and wouldn’t forget.  As her motion picture career began to slow down and she [...]

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Although he’s been retired from movies and television since the early 1980s, actor Skip Homeier is a talented character actor whose face will be familiar to almost anyone with a passing interest in popular entertainment.  Born in 1930, Homeier started out as a child actor on stage and made his big screen debut repeating his [...]

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This coming Saturday — tomorrow, August 6th – marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of show business’ forever and always top funny lady Lucille Ball, and also a day of Lucille Ball on TCM’s Summer Under the Stars.  It would be more than appropriate for anyone to celebrate this significant milestone, but I especially love Lucy.  My mother [...]

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I’m not going to assume that you know French and Saunders, that is, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, but I bet that you might.  Even if you haven’t ever caught their eponymous comedy series and specials via some means (they’ve been doing them for British TV since the late 1980s), perhaps you know Dawn French in [...]

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It’s summertime, and the perfect opportunity to pull out some photo albums — no groans, please — and take a look at Hollywood behind-the-scenes from my stash of old news photos.  It’s a nutty mixed bag, but that goes along with these lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, right? Here’s Jimmy “Schnozzola” Durante and the [...]

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Note:  Please read fellow Morlock Kimberly’s wonderful appreciation of Hollywood icon Elizabeth Taylor who died today, Wednesday, March 23, 2010, at the age of 79.  Her post is beautiful!  But since Morlocks clearly think alike sometimes, I also did a post at just about the same exact moment as Kimberly, and here it is:  Whether [...]

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I don’t know how many of you fell in love with the winsome and talented Jessica Harper back — well, back nearly 40 years ago, longer than many of you have probably been alive — but if you were among the legions of fans she garnered when she starred in 1974′s Phantom of the Paradise, you [...]

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Probably everybody’s heard by now about the resurgence of Pee-wee Herman, actor Paul Reubens’ singular creation, who’s now enjoying a joyous renaissance on the Broadway stage after wowing audiences in L.A. with a new version of his classic stage show of the 1980s.  As a super fan of Pee-wee and Reuben I’ve been following the [...]

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