Category: Uncategorized
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Thanks for Reading My Blog in 2019
The year is winding down and I wanted to take a moment to thank you for reading my blog during the past several months. I’ve gotten a lot out of blogging, and found that what I’d heard about blogging from two podcasts I listen to is true. Most importantly, for me anyway, it’s helped me…
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Story Structure, John Badham and Lajos Egri
When I was in graduate film school, different film directors or industry professionals would come to the school to screen a new film and talk about it. I got an answer to something that’s helped me many times with projects from a Q&A we had with director John Badham, who’d come to show us his…
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Reeducating Myself About Thomas Ince
I knew of Thomas Ince as part of the triumvirate that was the short-lived Triangle Film Company. I’d played for an Ince series at MoMA about ten years ago. Until my current Douglas MacLean project brought his name and work to the fore in my consciousness, that had been pretty much it. The DVD of…
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Ernie Kovacs, Fred Allen and The Medium of Television
Say what you want about Wikipedia – at least its listings either have factual attribution or will state the article needs verification. This keeps misstatements from being taken as fact or spreading. I’m still puzzled by the origin of an Ernie Kovacs quote. I have yet to find an interview or any source for Ernie…
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Marcel Perez: One Name Behind the Camera
Marcel Perez kept revising his onscreen persona and his character’s name throughout his career. His years working in the U.S. Found him sporting three different character names, and a different costume and persona each time he changed distributors. But one thing remained constant throughout all of this. He is always billed, as director, as Marcel…
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Audience Preservation: Silent Movies as Family Programming
One of my favorite sounds at a silent film show is that of kids’ laughter over the laughs of the adults in the theater. People bring their children or grandchildren to silent film shows from time to time, and it’s a wonderful thing. These are general audience shows that are part of a venue’s film…
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I’m so sorry about the multiple podcast emails…
Hi! Earlier today I imported my podcast from another site to my main one, and now you are getting emails about each episode. It’s a bug with my site, and I’m sorry this is happening. Feel free to delete these. Thanks! — Ben
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Home Movie Day Goes Sledding
I’d almost forgotten about the home movie gem I posted a few years ago. Southwest Silents on Twitter @SWSilents has been tweeting a Silent Film Xmas Advent, finding holiday-related silents online and sharing them. They’ve already posted two discoveries that I’d scored and posted to my YouTube channel. One was a film that had been…
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Before There Was Parkour, There Was…Douglas Fairbanks
There is no deeply dramatic reason for Douglas Fairbanks to leap over the benches and fences or climb the trees or anything else of extreme athleticism he does to get from point A to point B in American Aristocracy (1916), except that he is Douglas Fairbanks. What else would you expect from him? How much…
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The Blackhawk Films catalogs are available again!
USC Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive and Lobster Films Collaborate to Make Blackhawk Films Catalogs Available to Fans and Scholars Again The monthly arrival of the Blackhawk Films catalog was one of the most highly anticipated mail deliveries for me, growing up, as it was for many classic film fans in the 1970s and…