Hello!

(Written Monday:) Parts of Malibu continue to burn. It’s no relief for many, many others, but my two close contacts in the major fire zone to the West of Los Angeles report that they’ve come out unscathed, at least so far. Returned to his house, a close friend says he found that neighbors that stayed behind had rearranged the water hoses around his house, to better react if spot-fires popped up in the gulley behind. It’s been reported by Guillermo Del Toro that his home-museum of incredible fantasy horror and sci-fi memorabilia, the palace of delights seen in several choice video extras, has survived. Del Toro was evacuated for a time as well. I can’t imagine how I’d feel if that happened to me.

Don’t know why The New Yorker should care about the blessed streets of The City of The Angels, but Joe Dante steers us to this YouTube comparison video entitled Seventy Years of Los Angeles, Then and Now . The cars in the 1940s and today appear to be cruising right around central downtown, on Bunker hill and the streets just East of the Harbor Freeway. The alignment is pretty interesting — only occasionally do we see a building with an unchanged facade. A time-traveling Philip Marlowe wouldn’t know his own stomping grounds. Here’s another much longer still comparison called New York Then and Now, bridging today and 1890-1900 or so.

I received yet another nice note from correspondent “Mark” and followed his link to his page Movies ala Mark. He’s got a review site going with plenty of fun content, and none of it as long-winded as CineSavant ‘essays.’ Good pix too. See, it’s the right thing for reviewers to plug each others work — life isn’t only about dogged self-promotion, ya know.

That doesn’t make me averse to a little name-dropping now and then. Producer Mike Finnell wrote to tell me that the image I posted of a matte painting shot from Gremlins was indeed painted by my old cohort Rocco Gioffre. I have a long-ago memory of standing watching Rocco paint that exact masonite ‘canvas,’ but trusting memories is risky. The uplifting thought is knowing that someone like Mr. Finnell might peek in at CineSavant now and then.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson