Hello!

This Trailers from Hell entry has producer Jon Davison discussing Samuel Fuller’s legendary  White Dog. When its release stalled out, all that was left of an unfinished advertising campaign was a rough cut for a trailer.

Mr. Davison explains why the trailer looks so bad: nonlinear digital editing really didn’t take root until the 1990s, so a big film setup was required to cut most anything. The ‘fuzzy black-and-white dupe’ we see is a ‘dirty dupe,’ a cheap and fast poor quality dupe for editing purposes.

We learn that the story of White Dog is that of a studio trying to un-do a film during production with meddlesome memos, and ‘fix’ it with more outrageous kinds of interference. The point of Fuller’s movie is that a racist is training dogs to attack non-whites. Davison says that the trailer editor’s instructions were to make it look as if a movie is not about its own subject matter.

And people wonder why so much fighting went on behind the scenes of movies. It’s always good when this kind of film history gets told.

This entry gives us old TV ads starring actors that feature in today’s reviews.

Sent in by the always-appreciated Michael McQuarrie, this 30- second TV spot explains itself.

It stars a scintillating Spaghetti Western personality beloved by children everywhere. And must have been a hell of a lot of fun to shoot.

I’d say the joke was based on a popular series of comical  Granny Goose potato chip commercials from the middle 1960s. This is where most of us first saw the actor Philip Carey.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson