When Hollywood (as Gloria Swanson rapturously proclaimed in SUNSET BOULEVARD) “had the eyes of the world,” it also had the power as a Culture Industry to discriminate in representing other forms of American popular entertainment that competed with filmdom’s market share. For example, Putt-Putt Golf was a hugely popular entertainment during the Great Depression, drawing [...]

Experimental / avant-garde filmmaking became a fertile, serious art movement in the United States with the creation of MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON by the husband and wife team of Alexander Hammid and Maya Deren in 1943.  Experimental shorts had been made before MESHES, however this black-and-white film of dark Freudian imagery, filmed in bright Los [...]

There’s one obsession I’ve long pursued, while another obsession — for decades — has followed me around.  They finally collided. Artwork influenced by movies has been a personal obsession:  in the days before home video, I searched eight years for a public screening of Joseph Cornell’s ROSE HOBART; I spent last Christmas Eve at the [...]

Star vehicles can be a twonky trip when you know zip about the star it’s carrying.  Worshipful costuming, dramatic entrances and exits, and deifying lighting plans can help you interpret what kind of characters this actor generally plays, what fantasy audiences project upon him.  Indeed, few things illuminate Marshall McLuhan’s axiom that “the medium is [...]

By coincidence BOILING SAND went live on the 10th of October, the birthday of 1950s cult film director Ed Wood.   To commemorate both their introductions to the world, I’m re-posting a personal memoir of my early days in Hollywood and of knowing Wood’s makeup man, Harry Thomas. Have you ever heard Charlie Parker’s 1947 [...]

“No matter when one lives in Hollywood, one brings one’s own mental furniture along.”      – Otto Friedrich,  journalist / cultural historian The final (and rarest) episode of Jacques Demy’s Lola film trilogy has made its home video debut this month.   Unlike the first two, MODEL SHOP was in English and shot in Southern California. [...]

The Harry Ransom Center on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin is an Elysian Fields for film lovers. Among its treasures are the David O. Selznick Archives, the Robert De Niro Archives and the Gloria Swanson Archives. While doing some volunteer research work amidst their film holdings, I unearthed an artifact that [...]

This posting is a contribution to this week’s The Spirit of Ed Wood Blogathon at the Cinema Styles blogsite. Have you ever heard Charlie Parker’s 1947 recordings for the Dial label? Bird was in L.A., headed for a personal crash-and-burn that would soon land him in Camarillo’s mental hospital; for some sessions he had to [...]

It’s easy to get confused. Some folks mix up El Salvador and San Salvador. Others can’t differentiate between Monique van Vooren and Mamie Van Doren. For me, two ‘big status’ Westerns from the 1950s have always been interchangable in my mind. I’d never seen either one, but their window-dressings are similar: both starred Gary Cooper, [...]

I’ve been on a Brain Food Diet that has kept my thinking processes in overdrive this week. Even when my body would scream “No more!!” my brain would keep barreling down the highway with a cinder block on the accelerator. In order to chill, I spent Columbus Day morning sipping red wine and watching CIMARRON [...]