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An interesting filmic discovery this week at Wellesnet. How this 9 minutes of film came about is a little complicated, but CineSavant advisor Gary Teetzel manages a conscise description:

“Here’s some color footage from a production of Twelfth Night that Orson Welles directed at age 17 at the Todd School for Boys. He doesn’t act in the play, but he directed it and designed the set and costumes. His voice is heard providing an introduction.”

The interesting article was written by Ray Kelly. Welles presumably did not direct any of this home movie-style footage. The transfer does everything it can to prevent piracy, including formatting the reel wide-screen, chopping off the top and bottom of every shot:

Orson Welles’ Twelfth Night 

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And Joe Dante circulated without comment a link to another short AI film made with Sora,: Sora AI Film Series 1.

Most of the viewer comments are very positive. My first thought is that I’d like to see the text prompts (?) or script (?) or whatever that this started with.

I’d hate to think a computer program could be told, ‘make a brilliant montage using copyrighted clips,’ and then be instructed to ‘alter the clips enough to obscure their source and avoid infringement lawsuits.’  Or is that the fundamental premise behind the development of these AI tools?

When CGI came in, I wrongly thought some movies might carry a proud text disclaimer, saying ‘no digital effects, just camera art.’ Visuals By Committee are bad enough, but Visuals By AI is too much. Is it Art Made By Nobody, but Stolen From Everybody?   The link:

Air Head for Shy Kids 

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And since CineSavant falls for most everything having to do with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, we were curious when our Facebook feed — which normally siphons peep show videos and links to articles behind firewalls — sent us to a Netflix presentation that ‘enhances and colorizes’ the classic sci-fi epic.

The colorization appears done more for mood than realism — it’s more like a tinting pass … a rather odd tinting pass. Colors shift and drift and little blasts of red pop in, while faces stay fairly consistent. I noted that some swift pans change the overall color bluish for a moment. With all the colorization fireworks, the recovered Argentinian footage is less distracting, I must say.

Enhancing accessibility to vintage films without completely mutilating them has to be seen as something positive… even Giorgio Moroder’s disco revision can be lauded for Keeping the Torch lit for Metropolis. Soon to be 100 years old, the movie still captures our imaginations. As Aitam Bar-Sagi might say, anything that promotes this Astounding picture is good. Next stop, 3-D conversion?

I suppose this video tranformation was created via AI and a couple of descriptive prompts?  I did not find this on my Netflix account, but the web link is:

Metropolis (1927) Enhanced and Colorized 

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

This very dry wartime thriller must have sold more theater beverages than Lawrence of Arabia.

 

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Just last Saturday we reviewed one of the disc sets pictured above — now Dick Dinman offers his latest podcast on the same subject …

The newest DVD Classics Corner On the Air show reaches deep into Dick Dinman’s audio archives for conversations he had about Edward G. Robinson with stars Karl Malden, Kathleen Hughes, Gena Rowlands, and Margaret O’Brien, all of whom have worked with the famed actor. It’s a Kino Lorber tie-in, to accompany new releases of Robinson’s films Scarlet Street, Vice Squad, Black Tuesday and Nightmare.

The podcast, up for listening, is

4 Stars Salute Screen Legend Edward G. Robinson. 

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On the evening of April 22, producer Arnold Leibovit is presenting a smash George Pal double bill at a terrific venue: The historic Village Theater in Westwood. The Village Theater recently made big show-biz news, having been purchased by an élite group of Hollywood personalities. The landmark theater was one of the first big buildings in Westwood, back when one saw only empty fields between Wilshire Blvd. and the brand-new quad buildings at the brand-new UCLA.

Arnold has been restoring and promoting George Pal’s Puppetoons for decades. The April 22 event will premiere ten Technicolor Puppetoon restorations. They will be followed by a terrific opportunity to experience a giant state-of-the-art screening of the 4K restoration of Pal’s 1953 sci-fi masterpiece The War of the Worlds. At the Village Theater, that classic alien invasion thriller is going to be Big and Loud.

Scheduled for attendance are Liebovit, actress Ann Robinson and director Joe Dante. Full details are available at a Sci-fi Biz web page,

The War of the Worlds + George Pal Puppetoons.Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Movies that tell the embarrassing truth are to be cherished.

 

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The news that came out on Wednesday couldn’t make us happier: the Warner Archive Collection for April promises remasters of some of the most interesting films in their vault.

The announcement backs up hints from WAC spokesperson George Feltenstein that disc collectors would be ‘very very pleased’ with the 2024 titles. All of these are on CineSavant’s wish list, starting with two from Francis Ford Coppola:

←  Coppola’s UCLA ‘Treatise’ film You’re a Big Boy Now, the one that debuted Karen Black and features a soundtrack by The Lovin’ Spoonful. It’s been needing a remaster nigh-on forever.

→  Also Coppola’s Zooetrope kick-off production The Rain People, the road movie with Shirley Knight and James Caan and Robert Duvall. You know what happens to Rain People when they cry …

←  Fred Zinnemann’s The Nun’s Story, one of his best and also one of the best Audrey Hepburn movies, with Peter Finch and filmed in Europe and Africa.

→  William Wyler’s beloved Friendly Persuasion, a cherished family film that rewards in every respect; it’s also a Civil War movie about pacifism. The cast is really special; Gary Cooper, Dorothy McGuire, Anthony Perkins, Richard Eyer and Phyllis Love, plus the other starring Goose of the 1950s.

←   … and to make horror fans happy, MGM’s much desired pre-Code Boris Karloff shocker The Mask of Fu Manchu. They’ll need more space to write a ‘sensitivity disclaimer’ for this most overtly racist of all horror pre-Codes. The remaster reportedly restores to full quality eight minutes of scenes later found to be too offensive. Do you think Fu Manchu’s shouted promise might be a projection of white supremacist fears?: “We will KILL the white man and TAKE his women!”

CineSavant advisor Gary Teetzel passes on the news that George Feltenstein has promised more WAC horror and fantasy, sooner than later.

 

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And since we’re so happy about the WAC news, we don’t mind posting this link to the Warner Archive 15th Anniversary Sale, which ends on the 28th.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

The old saying ‘They Had Faces Then’ is no joke.

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Confused (or bored?) by CineSavant’s incessant man-splaining blab about widescreen processes?  A comic from seventy years ago simplifies everything: Panic #12.

Correspondent-advisor ‘B’ pointed us to this comic art from the end of 1954. The panels are from a Panic comic story called ‘S a Tragic Air Command, written by Al Feldstein and illustrated by Wallace Wood. It’s a parody of Paramount’s Strategic Air Command with James Stewart. The movie was touted as being in VistaVision, a big-format camera process then only a year old.

Feldstein and Wood begin their 7-page comic article with a primer on the weird new film formats, like CinemaScoop and Vasta Vision. The one being explained above is Cinerama, renamed CINERAMAMA for the comic. We like the Indian hood ornament attacking from the left.

←  An earlier panel showed a cameraman with three eyes, the better to see through Cineramama’s three-lens camera. I remember the same gag used more than once in Mad magazine, to show a happy enthusiast for 3-D photography. Both Images enlarge for readability.

This is likely Old News to fans of classic comics. ‘B’ says that Panic was EC’s own Mad knock-off. Its entry at Wikipedia includes a lot of detail.

This old Heritage Auctions page shows the whole 7 page story (good luck reading it) as a pricey sale from 11 years ago. Or, there’s this HipComic sales page that shows the cover (by Jack Davis), and says that #12 was Panic’s final issue.

 

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CineSavant contributor, Italo Western expert and good friend Lee Broughton forwards an interesting item …

This springer.com page is offering a free book download, Pinewood: Anatomy of a Film Studio in Post-war Britain, by author Sarah Street. It can also be purchased in hardcover from the same page. Lee describes the setup as ‘part of Academia’s move to an “open access model.”

I’ll want to check out Ms. Street’s book. I took a quick peek, and it looks heavily researched and annotated, and might be a useful resource when writing about English films. Springer Link describes it thusly:

“Explores how Pinewood came to be Britain’s dominant film studio, focusing on the key years 1936-55 … Provides a new approach to a particular aspect of British film history … Analyses 12 important British films, some of them considered classics made at Britain’s premier film studios.”

They end up with the statement This book is Open Access, which means that you have free and unlimited access.  This access system itself is something to learn more about. I write and give away this review page, but that’s not an option for writers looking to earn a living from their work.

I have little understanding of the politics of this, let alone the economics. Connected by marriage to Santa Monica College, I’ve heard about efforts to replace ridiculously expensive textbooks with Open Access materials. Students can get financial aid to cove Tuition, but then show up in class ‘faking’ having a textbook to learn from.

 

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

‘Everybody comes to The Femms’ … it’s an all-star house party, with creepy hosts.

 

Hello!

We’re always looking for items regarding John Wyndham’s great book The Day of the Triffids, and so jumped when correspondent Andy Melomet forwarded this Darkworlds Quarterly web feature, a concise overview of the Triffid phenomenon’s path from book to radio to various film and TV efforts.

Written by G.W. Thomas, the page is Darkworlds: The Day of the Triffids.

We like the introduction, aligning John Wyndham with other British Sci-fi authors in a clique of colleagues: Arthur C. Clarke, John Christopher, J. G. Ballard, Brian W. Aldiss and Bob Shaw.

 

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The all-seeing, all-knowing advisor Gary Teetzel sent this along. It’s a plug for a magazine, but the subject matter always interests us:

Never Coming To a Theater Near You.A24’s Issue 21 digs into movies announced and promoted, that never came to be. Many publications announced ‘upcoming movies’ in editorial columns. ’50s kids that read Famous Monsters were regularly treated to lists of exciting-sounding announcements for exciting pictures that never materialized. Studios small and big needed to generate buzz about their product, and it was traditional for illustrated announcement to hawk ‘planned’ features for which no contracts had been signed.

We covered some of these odd announcements through the archives of Bill Shaffer, in a CineSavant article called Where Were You in ’62, A.I.P.?

We note that guest editor Jon Dierlinger’s choices include some Cannon Films. That rings true for us, as beteen 1987 and 1989 this writer was neck deep in editing sales propaganda videos for Cannon. When the big project ‘Spiderman’ kept being delayed, every new announcement heralded a less-prestigious actor to play Peter Parker.

The sampled list has a few interesting titles. We thought ‘gee, what would a David Cronenberg screenplay for Frankenstein be like?’  But a full-page graphic didn’t mean that anything yet existed, or would ever exist, beyond a title. With Cronenberg’s producers the project was probably a serious idea … but the Cannon sales people used flashy ads and videos as bait to collect distributors’ pre-order funds, sometimes for movies that were just a few ideas on paper.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

God’s Lonely Man circa 1952, Arthur Franz.