Silents added to National Film Registry, Ebert offers Oscar nod, more

Posted on December 29, 2010
Filed Under contemporary, film news, miscellany

Yesterday James H. Billington, Librarian of the United States Congress, announced the 25 films that will be added to the National Film Registry this year. Included are some terrific titles, among them The Front Page, The Exorcist, All the President’s Men, The Pink Panther and McCabe and Mrs. Miller. The full list is here. Four of the inductees are early silent films, including A Trip Down Market Street; Thomas Gladysz has an excellent description of the early titles here. The puzzler for me on this year’s list is The Empire Strikes Back Read more

Writers in Hollywood: 1915-1951 (1990)

Posted on December 27, 2010
Filed Under books

The first writer to gain public recognition as a “Hollywood writer” was probably Anita Loos, who broke into the movie business by selling an unsolicited scenario to Biograph in 1912. Loos was in her early 20s and living with her parents in San Diego, where her father ran a theatrical company and showed one-reelers between acts. She made her first sale by mail, and Biograph’s story department had no idea “A. Loos” was a young woman. The first of her scenarios filmed by D.W. Griffith was The New York Hat (1912), Mary Pickford’s last film at Biograph; the cast also includes Lillian Gish, Lionel Barrymore and Mae Marsh. Loos moved to Hollywood over the objections of her parents—her mother thought Biograph was “an anteroom of Hell”—and became one of Griffith’s trusted lieutenants. She wrote several of his two-reelers, including The Musketeers of Pig Alley and A Narrow Escape, and in 1916 wrote the intertitles for Intolerance. She also wrote several sharp comedies for Douglas Fairbanks, including intertitles for The Mystery of the Leaping Fish, the scandalous two-reel dope joke in which Fairbanks plays a druggy detective named “Coke Ennyday.” Read more

Cambria Productions, Space Ghost and Jonny Quest

Posted on December 22, 2010
Filed Under animation, early television

Cambria Productions was a small independent animation house in West Hollywood established by cartoonist Clark Haas, Jr. and cameraman Edwin Gillette in 1957. The studio’s work is notable for its extremely limited animation and its use of Gillette’s Synchro-Vox technique, which enables animators to superimpose film of moving human lips onto a static image. Between 1959 and 1965 Cambria produced four animated television shows for children, one after another: Clutch Cargo, Space Angel, Captain Fathom and The New Three Stooges. None of them are very good, but the first two have interesting connections to Hanna-Barbera’s later, much-better-known Space Ghost and Jonny Quest. Read more

1952 color 3D stereoviews of Marilyn Monroe

Posted on December 8, 2010
Filed Under contemporary, film news, miscellany

Courtesy AbeBooks. From the catalog description:

This archive is comprised of 42 different, unpublished images that have been stored for more than 50 years. Klinker captured two near identical photos of each image to use in a stereographic type viewer and create a 3-D effect so while there are 42 images they are meant to create 21 ‘stereoviews’. The color positives have sleeves that would slip into the stereo-viewer. There is no stereo-viewer with the archive. VG.

The images were shot on the occasion of Monroe’s appearance on the Edgar Bergen-Charlie McCarthy radio show by the show’s writer, the delightfully named Zeno Klinker. The archive can be yours for $32,855.99 (plus $8.95 S/H). Read more

Daughter of the Night (1920)

Posted on December 6, 2010
Filed Under films, silent films

In Golden Age Hollywood films, the “juvenile romantic lead” is the most thankless of parts. He is a necessary but generic story appliance, the male component of a mechanical romance secondary to the main plot. He often enters the story with a giant target painted on his forehead; Leslie Howard’s most famous role is a supercharged juvenile romantic lead. The part’s full measure is best appreciated in classic horror films, wherein the juvenile romantic lead is the poor schmuck obliged to pitch woo to the leading lady when everyone can see that she only has eyes for the monster. In the 1930s, David Manners was the juvenile romantic lead par excellence. In Dracula (1931), Manners stuggles to save Helen Chandler from Bela Lugosi. In The Mummy (1931), he struggles to save Zita Johann from Boris Karloff. In White Zombie (1932) he faces Lugosi again, in The Black Cat he faces Karloff and Lugosi. Manners acquits himself well in these roles (save Dracula’s “John Harker,” an irredeemably bad part), but the stereotyping drove him to quit Hollywood in disgust. He would have greatly enjoyed Daughter of the Night, a German production from 1920 in which the juvenile romantic lead is… Bela Lugosi.
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