Hello!

That’s something you don’t see every day. On my way back home I caught this sight at the New Beverly Cinema in Hollywood. You really don’t expect to see director ‘one shot’ William Beaudine on a modern marquee. In fact, I doubt that his name ever was a common sight on a marquee. The screening is actually the tail end of a Quentin Tarantino- curated series.

Beaudine began directing in 1915. His last TV work was in 1968, just two years before he died. He directed hundreds of silent shorts, big silent features for Mary Pickford  (Little Annie Rooney,  Sparrows), an occasional higher-profile picture like  The Old Fashioned Way and then countless poverty row pictures. We recognize some of his genre items:  The Ape Man, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla and many, many Bowery Boys pictures.  Walt Disney liked him and put him to work in TV on The Adventures of Spin and Marty and the feature Ten Who Dared. And at the tail end there’s always  Billy the Kid vs. Dracula.

All this comes to mind with today’s marquee on Beverly Boulevard — Quentin ‘always on film’ Tarantino has quite a precedent going with his mid-week showing of Beaudine’s pictures  Make Me a Star  (1932) and  Don’t Gamble with Strangers  (1946). They have promise. The first is a Paramount remake of ‘Merton of the Movies’ with Joan Blondell & Stuart Erwin, and the second is a Monogram programmer with Kane Richmond. Writer Jim Hemphill put together a March 30 IndieWire article that goes deeper into the William Beaudine legacy. Both features appear to be available on Warner Archive Collection DVDs.

That’s Quentin for you — genuine Hollywood film culture is not dead.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

We saw this link in a post circulated by Joe Dante yet it’s been up for seven years. An anonymous Rod Serling fan cobbled together an ersatz episode of The Twilight Zone, using film clips purloined from the 1968 classic Sci-fi feature  Planet of the Apes.

What sounds like a nice exercise gets nicer when we learn that the revisionist editor added other elements to make his fan cut more authentic. The clips from the Franklin J. Schaffner movie are pan-scanned flat and in B&W, to better match the Twilight Zone format. And the editor scoured episodes of TZ to find just the right opening and closing narration to borrow. Rod Serling’s voice sounds like it belongs there.

Serling’s voice does belong there: the TV legend was a co-writer on Planet of the Apes, along with the previously blacklisted Michael Wilson.

A new article by Josh Weiss at the web page  Sy Fy has more information on the clever edit. We agree with the observation, ‘what could look more appropriate than the Statue of Liberty finale with the Twilight Zone music playing?’

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

A good Saturday to you … we were made aware of an interesting link at The Classic Horror Film Board. Board member Ray Faiola has put together a missing bit of picture and sound from the original release of a prime Universal horror picture.

The interest is built-in. We all know that the Karloff Frankenstein begins with a ‘word of warning’ from Edward Van Sloan, but we had forgotten that similar clip had been trimmed from the official version of Bela Lugosi’s original  Dracula.

We’re not quite sure what we’re looking at. “It’s a reconstruction of the long-missing Edward Van Sloan curtain speech from Dracula that syncs up a 16mm silent print with audio from a Vitaphone disc.” But are they saying that that’s what we’re hearing?   They elsewhere ask if some collector has a Vitaphone disc for the last reel of Dracula.  Online, some are theorizing that the track we hear may have been created by AI. I don’t know enough to have a coherent response to that.

But the clip itself sounds pretty cool:

And Joe Dante is circulating a link to this article from Architectural Digest written by Michele Duncan and posted on April 22, 2026.

The title says exactly what it is. The pictures show the family man and happy daddy Orson doing the domestic thing, and Duncan’s text has interesting things to add. The explanations for the photo images are more than illuminating. Welles fans get to see where he lived and worked. We’re told that his neighbors were Greta Garbo and Shirley Temple.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

We’re pretty much in awe of the work schedule of friend Alan K. Rode , who very shortly will be opening the 2026 instalment of the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival. The Palm Springs festival has been going strong since 2000.

This year’s festival runs from May 7-10 with a great lineup of pictures. New digital restorations of Allan Dwan’s Slightly Scarlet and Blake Edwards’ Gunn, plus an eclectic lineup of moody thrillers — Joan Crawford in The Damned Don’t Cry, Sidney Poitier and Richard Widmark in No Way Out, the gritty English productions Hell Drivers and It Always Rains on Sunday, and even a chance to see the explosive Bonnie and Clyde on a big screen.

Allan has the particulars of the festival all mapped out … attendees slip into town to enjoy the show and the town before the summer heat takes over.

Thanks to a nice tip from correspondent Michael McQuarrie, we get to see a YouTube encoding of a documentary by favorite Trailers from Hell guru Brian Trenchard-Smith: a 1974 piece on stunt work in Hong Kong action pictures, circa 1974.

Trenchard-Smith wrote, produced and directed the martial arts movie documentary, which features stuntman Grant Page, but also Carter Wong, Lawrence Lee, June Rhee, Wang Yu — and stars George Lazenby and Stuart Whitman, then in Hong Kong filming Hammer’s Shatter. It’s one of 4 or 5 stunt-related films by Trenchard-Smith, before his directing career took off with The Man from Hong Kong.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

The new Trailers from Hell podcast The Movies That Made Me has snagged the director and home video entrepreneur David Gregory for their newest interview show of career highlights and film favorites.

We first met Mr. Gregory years ago, when his Severin Films was turning out DVDs; he directed  his first feature around 2008 and has continued to several documentary pieces. We’ll be looking for his newest, a  feature documentary on the history and legacy of the Paris Grand Guignol theater. According to TFH, David is tasked with profiling his 5 fave Severin releases, and 5 dream titles he’s like to someday release.

25 years ago, when editing a TCM documentary about Joan Crawford, there was one movie we couldn’t see, called  Letty Lynton. Correspondent Richard Coombs sent in this link to an article in The Guardian detailing the legal conflict that took Letty Lynton off screens just four years after its premiere.

Writer Pamela Hutchinson gives the pertinent facts. The story was based on a real-life murder, that later became a very different movie by David Lean. The movie created a fashion fad over an Adrian-designed ‘Letty Lynton’ dress style that became very popular. Crawford’s grandson Casey LaLonde took part in the effort to clear Letty Lynton to be screened again. It is going to be shown at the TCM Fest in May, and then be released on disc by The Warner Archive Collection.

Oh, and one more thing. We love living in California, but all those poor commuters are really in a rough spot right now … here’s the bad news at the pump this morning.

Let’s hope for the best for all of us.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson