Hello!

Here’s a link to a 1960 ‘documentary’ TV show that will be of interest to fans of Japanese movies, with some Hong Kong coverage thrown in.

It’s been posted by the stock video company  Periscope Films, an outfit that appears to have access to anything and everything; their amazing resources include Hollywood home movies. We linked to an excellent example for this Column  two years ago.

The TV series for the documentary is called At Home Abroad. It was produced by Bing Crosby and hosted by Jack Douglas, who narrates a tour of Japanese movie and TV studios, and lets us ‘meet’ actor Tatsuo Saito and singer Inoue Nobuo. Of big appeal are giant marquee exhibits touting both Japanese and U.S. films; we also see footage of a rehearsal for an action film scene.

They also jump to Hong Kong to show us the building housing the Shaw Brothers, plus some film footage there. The signage on the streets of Tokyo is interesting: an English message outside a theater showing an Italian import says — ‘dialogue in Italian.’ The biggest surprise is the finish — a speech by film critic Donald Richie!

And second up is a link offered by swiped from David J. Schow, about the ‘glamorous’ work of film archive preservation.

The Museum of Modern Art and The Academy Archive were granted custodianship of the film archives of Russ Meyer, the self-proclaimed nudie filmmaker who passed away in 2004. Ol’ Russ kept a lot of film in his house up in Lake Hollywood, and this MoMA article goes over the investigation of rooms bursting with his work. No nudie glamour, just a lot of cardboard boxes and Goldberg cans. Although we wonder if the pool we see was used for any movie shoots.

The detailed little article outlines what a process that looks like painstaking hard work. They even catalogued Meyer’s home movies.

The label Severin Films is presently remastering the Russ Meyer library on 4K … we reviewed  one of his biggest hits just one year ago.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson