Hello!

This item might hand readers some fun, at least those curious about Hollywood real estate!   Good old Michael McQuarrie has once again made my day, with a film clip link from ‘Mega.nz’ of 9 minutes of aerial footage of the Hollywood area, reportedly filmed sometime during the 1940s.

Somebody took a full reel of 35mm film from a moving airplane, that’s flying pretty darn slow; we thought ‘helicopter’ until an errant wing and tail slip into our view.

The perfectly clear images do several loops up and down Hollywood Blvd., essentially the same corridor that in the movie  “1941” is lined with 4 and 5-story buildings. As you can see here, only occasional buildings are over two stories in height. The coverage begins at Hollywood and Vine, with The Broadway department store and I believe the Taft building, both of which were duplicated for the movie. The view then flies all the way West to almost La Brea, and turns back again. We can spot several theaters, the Pantages, the Egyptian, the Paramount (now the El Capitán) and finally Grauman’s Chinese with its walled forecourt.

↑  The picture just above comes from 01:49 on the clock that comes with the film clip. It shows the Chinese Theater just right of center. The big building on the left is the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. By the way, not only did ‘1941’ give the Boulevard taller buildings (to make a trench for the planes to fly through, just like Star Wars), we relocated the landmark buildings closer together. The historic Hollywood USO was actually off on a side street.

After the aerial view hoses down Hollywood Blvd. a couple of times, we see some random shots I can’t identify, then Cahuenga Blvd. up until we see the Hollywood Bowl. We end up in The Valley, over two studios.

One of the last clips begins on the Universal Backlot, and then shifts East until we fly over Warner Bros. It moves over the dozens of sound stages to show the vast back lot of street fronts. By the 1970s most of those sets were gone, replaced by parking lots. The Warner lot was at that time shared by Columbia, and called The Burbank Studios.

↓  The second picture with all the arrows is a detail of a frame that pops up at 08:40. It’s the famed New York Street Set, that was never taken all the way down. The street fronts were all reconfigured many times, but this is where all the Hollywood Blvd. scenes from ‘1941’ were filmed.

The instructions to generate text failed me, so you have to put up with my crude letters and arrows. As you can see, all the fake buildings are about two stories tall, but they have no tops. Here’s the ‘legend’ for the diagram:

A. This, I believe, was the studio commissary in 1979. It had a little studio store up front. I only ate there once.

B. Walking downward on the photo, you get to the row of brownstone apartments, New York style, that resembles the street seen in many WB pix. Last month I mentioned  Wait Until Dark. As you can see when you watch, there are so many false front streets that there might be another similar streetfront that is the real location for that movie. In the video the view pivots so you can see the front of the row of brownstones.

C. This is the front of the building that became the USO for ‘1941’, with the big neon sign that is shot down.

D. This corner has the traffic signal in ‘1941’ that John Belushi’s strikes when his P-40 fighter plane crashes and slides across the intersection. It was a real full-sized plane mock up, with no visual effects at all. An enormous ramp was built down the middle of the street, engineered by A.D. Flowers and Logan Frazee’s crack special effects unit. Steven had this expensive stunt filmed twice. On the first attempt a cable snagged and slowed the plane down, so it didn’t come off the ramp as fast as it should. The second take, quite a bit later, was perfect. When struck, the traffic signal fell halfway over, perfectly. Exactly the luck of Spielberg.

E. Right in front of that corner, a few minutes earlier, is where Dan Ackroyd’s M3 Lee tank comes to a stop, in the middle of a crowd of rioters. Tank rebuilder and driver Pat Carmen drove it at full speed down the row of brownstones and took a hard right turn into the intersection, running over a car on the way. The shots in the movie are not sped up. Pat skidded to a stop in a rectangle space kept empty for the tank’s final position. A fatal mistake would seem too easy, but Pat knew he could do it safely.

F. This is where the movie theater is, where Robert Stack stops to see Disney’s Dumbo. The street only looks broad — it’s hard to believe that a car could do a U-turn in it. A big car stunt takes place there as well, during a dialogue scene. No optical effects.

and

G. The tank ‘charges’ to this point from position E, so that Bobby Di Cicco can rescue Dianne Kay from Treat Williams. Without a cut it skids to a stop, overturning a big truck, which was actually overturned with a Logan Frazee / AD Flowers mechanical trick.

Here’s the link for the full video:

And this idea for a good item just occurred to me. Fifteen years ago I frequented two ‘acccumulator pages’ I really liked, that gathered eclectic art and thought pieces and obsessive little memes from various corners of the web-o-sphere, arranged as if in an art gallery. The coolest was Tom Sutpen’s  “If Charlie Parker was a Gunslinger, there’d be a whole lot of Dead Copycats.”, and it was chock full of great art and frequent non-PC content, sometimes very non-PC content. It eventually disappeared, without being archived anywhere, it seems. [ That’s a good reminder to get serious about migrating some old DVD Talk articles over to Trailers from Hell. ]

But the second runner-up is still here, even if it is now a shadow of its former self. It’s called  This Isn’t Happiness and has something of the same modus operandi, except that in recent years it’s become somewhat tame and bland. It’s still worth checking out.

The biggest lift I get from This Isn’t Happiness is manipulating the URL to reach back in time … if one goes back just a couple of thousand posts, it gets fascinating, with clever, artistic, witty, creative, inspirationsal, and sometimes erotic items. Some are themed. What you do is drop into the page, go the second page listed as “2”, and then change the URL so that ‘2’ becomes any 4 numbers between roughly 2,000 and 9,000. Here’s a random starting link, to page  6584. Nothing is dated, but every once in a while pops up an ‘obit’ photo that will give you a clue where in the timeline a post item fell. Current events are sometimes noted as well. Good luck!  You’ll know right away if you like it, and if you do it will be addictive.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

The unstoppable Michael McQuarrie has found a quality item that fans of Spaghetti westerns will want to see, if it isn’t already old news to one and all. This one-hour TV show from 2014 covers the ‘other’ Italo western franchises that the faithful swear by, Django, Sartana, Trinità and the Others…

This encoding is in French only; a friend jerry-rigged some English subs for me, by what process I don’t know; I’m told that many resourceful fans can do the same. The participants in the intereview docu inlcude Sergio Sollima, Ernesto Gastaldi, Terence Hill, and Bud Spencer. It’s a very slick production.

Plus, a really worthwhile read…  a key article for just about anybody trying to understand the evolution of film sound, and the history of studios preserving (or not preserving) the riches of their film vaults. It’s from Sight and Sound, 1988, and it’s written by Michael Arick, who I would later work for as an editor for quite a few years.

The article was written before studios had film restoration departments. If I remember the story correctly, Michael was hired by Warner Bros. to spearhead special preservation and restoration projects partly on the reputation of this one piece of writing. Michael made a big contribution to the restoration of the 1954 Judy Garland  A Star Is Born, and was instrumental in recovering elements that made possible the restoration/revision/multiple versions of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.

The article makes mention of a list of Warners’ movies from the middle 1950s for which there was no surviving 4-track stereophonic audio. Later on, Michael Arick would find an ingenious way to recover many of those original 4-track recordings, just in time before they disintegrated, became unplayable. That’s why we can now hear perfect preserved stereo tracks for classics like Elia Kazan’s East of Eden. The recovered original 4-track stereo audio for Howard Hawks’ Land of the Pharaohs doubles its appeal.

The article hasn’t dated much at all. It is a clear and concise technical history, with the kind of side information that helps to connect the dots on what one already knows about movie audio. The article starts on page 43 and is titled

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

We got our Forbidden Planet review up as fast as we could, to join the varied coverage we expect from other reviewers. Today’s CineSavant Column is just two small items of lesser interest, but we will take what we can get. Advisor Gary Teetzel sent along this link to a ‘new’ trailer for the 1957 Toho epic Chikyu Boeigun, aka ‘Earth Defense Force’, released around the world as  The Mysterians.  We wondered if this trailer for the ‘2026 release’ would look different from our old DVD copies, which it does not.

It does look like the trailer was put through a program to enhance the color and buff away dirt, dings, scratches — but it’s still the same soft image. Back around 1990, I spent big money on a Japanese import laserdisc, the first video viewing available in Tohoscope. Toho’s discs didn’t normally have English subtitles, which made our viewings a little less coherent than they might have been.

Does anybody own one of Toho’s ‘new 4K remasters’ of The Mysterians?  I assume that they’re still English-language challenged. But is the scan/colorization/encoding really an improvement, with better color values?  Did they try to digitally remove the snowstorms of negative dirt, that we theorize were the result of early attempts to do opticals without ‘clean’ protocols?

And what’s up with the funky soundtrack on this transfer? I turned it down to silence.

This entry is even less substantial. Editor Steve Nielson was going through some old paperwork and found a receipt for a laserdisc rental. He’d routinely drive all the way from Santa Monica to Dave’s the Laser Place.

Dave’s the Laser Place was for years a busy shop frequented by industry types as well as celebs that bought discs by the dozen and ordered up thousands of dollars of high-end video and audio gear. But when DVD came in, the days of the laser format were numbered, and so was the store.

The unimpressive item is a credit slip for a free rental … all transactions were done on paper, and maybe Steve rented a disc that didn’t play. I wonder if Steve can still redeem it?   It’s only from 35 years or so ago.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

It was fun to learn that my favorite author the last few years, Leonardo Padura, has been awarded the prestigious Liber Award, as reported two days ago online. Padura’s most popular books follow the career of Havana detective Mario Conde, a professional who has gone through all the bad times in Cuba, solving crimes while seeing the souring of his country’s social dream. The books chart the changes as Cuba went into survival mode, starting in the early 1990s.

I’m deep into reading Padura’s historical novels, about present day investigations into the past. One is a ‘Conde’ book, in which Mario digs into the last days of Ernest Hemingway living in Cuba, that may have involved a murder. The best-known of his historical books is his masterpiece The Man Who Loved Dogs, about the Spaniards and Russians who assassinated Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940.

I’ve only found a few film productions based on Padura’s works. He wrote the screenplay for 2014’s Return to Ithaca (Retour à Ithaque), a lively drama that transpires over one night on a Havana rooftop … the only private place that old friends can gather to talk the truth, and feel somewhat secure from political repercussions. I’ve only found European Region 2 DVDs of Return to Ithaca.

The more conventional  Four Seasons in Havana (Cuatro estaciones en La Habana) is a four-feature miniseries adapting the Conde books known as ‘The Havana Quartet.’ It’s a really fine production.

The problem is that Four Seasons in Havana is now difficult to find. It made its debut on Netflix but has been gone for six years. On streaming platforms, content can be made available or be erased from existence by whim. There are no domestic disc releases. I’ve only found one DVD set, produced in Holland and available only in Europe. It’s a very good encoding of the four features on two discs, but to most American fans it’s useless: it’s only in Spanish Language, and the only subtitles are Dutch. Not only that, the thick Cuban accents can be daunting to non-Cuban Spanish speakers. Oh, it’s a Region 2 DVD as well, so an all-region player is a must. If your Spanish skills is good, I reccomend it. It was filmed in Havana and the acting and directing are excellent.

I’m glad that Leonardo Padura won this award. His film work really ought to be available here, and make him better known. People that like Michael Connelly (me) will love him.

And because people ask, this last entry is just a list, of discs on hand to review, and the ‘wish list’ of what’s expected.

Already in hand at CineSavant Central are these … some are partly written:

Spike of Bensonhurst  4K   (Fun City Editions)
Sergeant Rutledge (The Warner Archive Collection)
French Dressing (Powerhouse Indicator)
The Saragossa Manuscript  4K   (Radiance Films)
The First Deadly Sin (Vinegar Syndrome)
Cruel Story of Youth  4K   (The Criterion Collection)
The Island (KL Studio Classics)
The Wings of Eagles (The Warner Archive Collection)
Hell’s Highway, the True Story of Highway Safety Films (Kino Cult)
The Human Comedy (The Warner Archive Collection)
Hud  4K   (The Criterion Collection)
Project Hail Mary  4K   (MGM/Alliance)
Coup de Torchon  4K   (The Criterion Collection)

Expected soon or hoped for in the next couple of months:

Forbidden Planet  4K   (Arrow Films)
Danza Macabra 5 (Severin Films)
The First Films of Samuel Fuller (Eclipse 5)
Out of the Past  4K   (The Warner Archive Collection)
Ryan’s Daughter  4K   (The Warner Archive Collection)
Fantastique: The Dreams and Nightmares of French Cinema (Radiance)
Skyscraper Souls (The Warner Archive Collection)
Planet of the Vampires  4K   (Radiance)
The Shout  4K   (The Criterion Collection)
The Lost Patrol (The Warner Archive Collection)
The Silence of the Lambs  4K   (The Criterion Collection)
Frankenstein (The Criterion Collection)
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (The Criterion Collection)
The Right Stuff  4K   (The Criterion Collection)
Shoot the Piano Player  4K   (The Criterion Collection)
(Horror of) Dracula  4K   (Hammer)

Plus these three, just confirmed.

Operation Kid Brother (OK Connery) (Explosive Media)
Machine Gun Kelly (Explosive Media)
The Giant of Marathon (Explosive Media)

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson