THE PIXAR TOUCH: Sample Chapter

Without a doubt the biggest success story in films in the past two decades has been the rise of PIXAR Animation Studios. A small sidebusiness started by George Lucas but sold off to Steve Jobs, the small northern California-based studio rose to prominence through a combination of smart business strategies and the boundless imagination of its output.

Recently, The PIXAR Touch, David A. Price's fabulously researched hostory of the company from its earlliest days to the present, has been released to some rave reviews. We haven't had a chance to dig into the book ourselves, but we can point you in the direction of something that may whet your appetite to read it.

This weekend, the New York Times, published a chapter excerpt from the book, which charts the development of Toy Story 2 from direct-to-home video quickie release to a feature film in its own right. The decisions that went into this evolution are as much practicle business ones as they were articstic, and makes for fascinating reading.

And if you're interested in reading The PIXAR Touch, click hereto order the book from Amazon.

Poster: Coen Brothers' BURN AFTER READING

If there's one thing I like about the Coen Brothers, it is that there films routinely show a wide knowledge of film history. Classic genres as diverse as slapstick, farce, suspense and film noir all inform their various movies. And sometimes, like in their upcoming dark spy comedy Burn After Reading, its possible that all those influences come into play. We don't want to give too much of the plot away, but the movie centers on anunpublished memoir written by a disgruntled former-CIA operative (John Malkovich) that falls into the hands of two dimwitted gym instructors (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt).

What's great is the film's first released poster (click to make bigger), which appeared over at Cinematical. The bold color design and off-kilter, blockish design recall the style of poster artist Saul Bass, who created memorable promotional art for such films as Vertigo, Anatomy Of A Murder and The Man With The Golden Arm. The Coens are definitely giving us a hint of what to expect from the film when it opens on September 12.

Restoring THE GODFATHER

Film preservation is not focused solely on rescuing and restoring crumbling black and white films from the earliest days of Hollywood. Preservationists' sites can be focused on films needing repair from as recent as the 1970s. Before George Lucas embarked on his "improvements" for the the original Star Wars trilogy Special Editions, the negative and elements from the original 1977 blockbuster needed to undergo extensive restoration first.

Another American classic in need of rescuing was Francis Ford Coppola's gangster epic, The Godfather. Fortunately, Paramount Pictures has stepped up and just completed a vast digital restoration of all three films, completely overhauling them for a future DVD release. Last month, American Cinematographer ran a great article on the digital restoration work done to the films. As is the case with most American Cinematographer articles, it tends to be heavy on the technical jargon, but if you can still push your way through all that, you can still get a good idea for the hurdles that the crew jumped in order to preserve the films.

Case in point, the famous scene in the first film where Michael Corleone, played by Al Pachino, kills Sollozzo and McCluskey. The elements the restoration team had to use for this scene had numerous problems, from tears in the negative to variations in the processing of the original camera negative over the two days that the scene was shot. Led by Robert Harris, who writes a never-frequent-enough column over at The Digital Bits, the restoration team went in and had to use computers to preform a number of tweaks and fixes, most of which that would not have been possible with a chemical restoration process. The two before and after pictures on the left gives you an idea of the results they were able to achieve.

The newly restored films will be available on DVD (and possible Blu-Ray) in September. Hopefully Paramount will also strike a small number of prints to release to theaters. Reportedly, Coppolla has stated that the films look the best they have since they were first released.

Via CNet.

The Nutty Critics Of Jerry Lewis

Jerry Lewis and the French.

The latter's appreciation for the former is almost always noted with a sneer or a laugh.

But what could be the possible reason for such a reaction to a comic who ? Is it justified? Does it all lie in some murky political posturing?

That's what Michael McGonigle wanted to know. You can read his thoughts on it here.

Newsarama Counts Down the Top "Genre" films by Decade

Making lists is a fun way to get attention to your newly refurbished website. Readers will discuss how happy their favorites are on the list or how mad they are that their favorites aren't on the list. But at least they are discussing your website.

Newsarama, the former comic book news site, current pop culture information catch-all site, is starting a series of articles where they list the best "genre" (I.E. Sci-Fi, Horror and Fantasy) by decade. Their list for the 1920s and 1930s is up now. The list is heavy on Universal monsters, serials and renown classics. Next time they will be looking at the genre films of the 1940s.

Larry Gross Remembers Making 48 HOURS

Long before it was a CBS investigative journalism show, 48 Hours was known as the movie that launched the film career of Saturday Night Live performer Eddie Murphy as well as gave rise to the buddy/action genre.

Over at Movie City News, a new weekly column has launched where screenwriter Larry Gross shares his own journal entries, misspellings, grammatical errors and all, from the time period he was involved in the making of the film. So far, two installments have been published covering the first five weeks or so that Gross has been involved with the film (Part 1 is here and part 2 is here) and it makes from some great, if at times shockingly candid, reading.

What’s fascinating is that at this point in 1982, Hollywood has transitioned out of the studio system that defined the industry and allowed it to thrive for decades into a system more run by mavericks. However, there is still a knowledge of what has gone before them, especially when Gross recounts a dinner conversation that culminates with 48 Hours director Walter Hill comparing himself to Howard Hawks and Steven Spielberg, whose ET was on the verge of being released, as Victor Fleming.

Wither John Hughes?

The release of the comedy Drillbit Taylor last weekend has sparked a rather curious phenomenon, a resurgence in interest in the films of John Hughes and in the writer/director himself, who hasn't been seen in Hollywood for over a decade now.

While in a production deal with Paramount Pictures, the man behind Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Weird Science had cranked out a number of story treatments, Drillbit Taylor included, that simply sat around the studio waiting for someone to develop them. (Though for Drillbit Taylor, he receives screen credit under his old pseudonym of Edmond Dantes.)

With Drillbit Taylor, that someone turned out to be Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow. Both are becoming rapidly known for becoming to comedy films today what Hughes was in the mid-1980s, creators of comedies that balanced raucous humor with an undertone of sweetness and a keen understanding of what being a teenager is like.

Back in the 1990s, Hughes shifted his focus from teen comedies to more family friendly fare such as the Home Alone series, Beethoven (1992) and Disney’s live action 101 Dalmatians (1996) before withdrew from filmmaking and retreating to the confines of northern Illinois. His representatives routinely refuse media requests for interviews and his long absence has lead Kevin Smith, who used Hughes’ mythical Illinois town of Shermer as a plot point in Dogma, to call him the "J D Salinger of our generation" in a recent LA Times piece.

Although some may be quick to poo-poo that particular idea, I think Smith is on to something. Both created works with teen characters who felt alienated from the world around them and how they refuse to bow to the pressures of other’s expectations. Those of us teens who sat in darkened cinemas in the mid-1980s identified with the various characters stuck in Saturday detention in The Breakfast Club, hoping that others would see beyond their preconceived notions of whatever social clique we were in. We all wanted to stand up and tell the world to see us as how we were, not how they wanted to see us. We wanted a friend whom we could ditch school and have an awesome day off with. His characters became cinematic friends and we wonder where they are today.

Hughes’ influence on a generation of filmmakers is obvious in the works of Apatow, Rogen, Smith and others. His films have also become such a part of the American cinematic consciousness, that the upcoming documentary American Teen has copied the Breakfast Clubs iconic poster for its own advertising campaign. With this one simple poster, American Teen shows to a potential ticket-buyer that it deals with some of the same themes that Hughes worked with.

It seems indisputable to me that parallels can’t be denied between Hughes and Salinger, even looking past their shared retreat into hermitage. Salinger’s Catcher In the Rye continues to be read today, more than four decades after its publication. Factor out the 1980s clothing and hairstyles and John Hughes’ films still hold up today, watchable and relatable for a new generation.

Friday Flashback: THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY

In 1903, The Great Train Robbery, a (by today's standards) short, twelve-minute film from Thomas Edison's Edison Films production company would forever transform motion pictures from curious novelty to the emerging art form of the coming century.

The film is commonly referred to as being the first early film to tell a story, but that’s only partially true. Train Robbery's director Edwin Porter, a former Edison Films cameraman, had already directed Life Of An American Fireman earlier that year, which depicted a fire fighter rescuing a woman from a burning home. But with Great Train Robbery, Porter has tightened up his editing somewhat, creating the concept of cross-cutting at the same time. Porter also used double exposures to create the illusion of the passing landscape seen outside the mail car's door.

Shot partially in Essex County, New Jersey, the Lackawanna Rail Line and Essex County Park make serviceable stand-ins for Wyoming, though it is doubtful many in the audience could tell the difference. Many prints of the film that circulated featured the addition of color in several scenes through a process known as hand-tinting. The version below does not feature any hand-tinting, though it can be seen in this shortened version here.)

More appropriately referred to as the first western film, The Great Train Robbery can also be seen as the first heist film, a genre still going strong with this weekend’s premier of The Bank Job. The film’s storyline was reportedly inspired by the August 29, 1900 robbery of a Union Pacific Railroad train outside of Table Rock, Wyoming. In that train robbery, four members of George Leroy "Butch Cassidy" Parker’s Wild Bunch gang (The name was changed to "The Hole In The Wall Gang" for Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid to avoid confusion with Sam Peckinpah's own film The Wild Bunch) forced the conductor to uncouple the passenger cars from the rest of the train before blowing up the mail car safe to get at approximately $5,000 in cash.



Unlike a majority of films from the earliest days of motion pictures, The Great Train Robbery's original nitrate negative still exists. Held by the Library of Congress, new prints could conceivably be struck at any time.

Another first for The Great Train Robbery- It was the first film to achieve such popularity that it spawned a parody. Also produced by Edison, 1905’s The Little Train Robbery featured an all-child cast and a storyline where the gang of outlaws hold-up a miniature train to steal its cargo of dolls and candy. You can see portion of that film here.

Happy 75th Birthday KING KONG

Although his cinematic trip to Manhattan didn't turn out as planned, King Kong's debut at the Radio City Music Hall 75 years ago today launched the oversized ape from Skull Island to instant icon status, the one height he has successfully managed to not fall from.

The brainchild of adventurer-turned-producer Merian C. Cooper, King Kong was a revelation to its initial audiences who had never seen such a film before. While Kong's special effects maestro, Willis O'Brien, had created the stop-motion animation dinosaurs for the silent classic The Lost World eight years earlier, this was the first time anyone had seen a giant monster rampage outside a jungle setting. For those first New Yorkers, Kong wasn't just rampaging through civilization, he was tearing up the elevated train that some of them had probably ridden to the theater. The adventure was just outside the theater's door, with the Empire State Building visible from just about any point in the five boroughs of New York City.

But Kong's appeal wouldn't be confined to just Gotham. Theater patrons across the country thrilled to the sight of Kong's scaling of the Empire State Building. In Los Angeles, a young Ray Harryhausen saw the film and would be inspired to a career in special effects, eventually getting to work with Kong's O'Brien on 1949’s Mighty Joe Young. In Japan, a knockoff film King Kong Appears In Edo was quickly produced. Although Japan would become the genre's biggest producer, Kong was still the first giant monster film, providing the template for all monster movies to come.

Kong would prove popular enough that it would become one of the largest grossing movies in studio RKO’s reissue program, hitting theaters every couple of years to bring a couple of hundred thousand dollars into the studio’s coffers all the way into the mid-1950s, when it was sold into television syndication by the studio's owner Howard Hughes. Fittingly, one of its first airings was in New York City, where it was shown for five days straight on station WOR.

When repeated theatrical revivals and televisions screenings weren't enough, audiences would turn to spinoff projects of varying quality for more tales of Kong's escapades. For the Japanese, Kong would fight Godzilla and later Escape to fight the dinosaur Gorosaurus. His story would be retold in 1976 in a film that substitutes the World Trade Center's Twin Towers for the Empire State Building and which launched the career of Jessica Lange. At the end of 2006, Peter Jackson released his three-hour love letter/remake.

Surprisingly, for all the other times Kong was brought back to the silver screen, it was only the original film that utilized the time consuming stop-motion animation. Perhaps there is something in the meticulously handcrafted work that ultimately appeals over the efforts of the Japanese's man-in-a-suit “suitmation” techniques or Jackson's computerized Kong.

It would be tempting to try and read some subtext equating Kong with the Great Depression and how he would fall to the indomitable spirit of the American people as embodied by the Empire State Building, but that would be missing the point. Cooper, O’Brien and the film’s co-director Ernest B. Schoedsack only wanted to thrill their Depression Era audiences for a little while. And their ambitions achieved appropriately Kong-sized success.

Sundance's Best Films- 2 Views

With the Sundance Film Festival kicking off in Park City, Utah this weekend, a couple of sites have decided to take a look at the festival's history and offer up what they think are the fests most influential films.

Entertainment Weekly narrowed their list down to 11 entries, while The Onion's AV Club came up with a list of 10 films that they claim changed filmmaking. Interestingly, between the two lists there are only four films that overlap. Both lists start off chronoligically with 1984's Stranger Than Paradise. But while The Onion's list ends with 1995's The Brothers McMullen, Entertainment Weekly's list goes right up to 2006's Little Miss Sunshine.

So if you can't make it out to Park City for the next weeks or so of what will undoubtedly be an even more frenzied flurry of film acquisition than usual thanks to the Writers Guild strike, why not pull a few of the films listed on these two lists off the shelf or place them at the top of your Netflix queue and have your own private Sundance festival.

Top 50 Lost Films

We all know that the early years of cinema are not known for their farsightedness in preserving the history was being creating. To many on the business side of things, movies were a disposable commodity. Once every possible penny had been wrung out of audiences through exhibition, prints were often disposed of unceremoniously, with no thought given to possible future reuse. The problem became exasperated once talkies came on the scene, with boat loads (literally) of believed to be obsolete silent films dumped into the Pacific. More films were lost to studio fires and to having their silver nitrate content stripped for the war effort during World War II. Those films that did manage to survive all of the above were still vulnerable to the inevitable chemical breakdown of their emulsion and film stock.

It wasn’t until the advent of television in the 1950s that studios began to realize that there could be a secondary market for their entire old product and began to think about more than casually preserving their history.

Even then, much had been lost. While the occasional long-thought-lost film does manage to surface from the dusty back shelves of an archive or film collector’s private horde, most are forever gone.

Film Threat has just finished publishing a list of what they consider to be the top 50 lost films of all time, and it is hard to find fault with any of the entries on the list. It’s also heartbreaking to see the wide diversity of subjects covered here, with missing cinema moments ranging from the first Technicolor film and feature-length American color film, The Gulf Between (1917), to the only filmed performance of ragtime great, composer Scott Joplin to King Kong Appears In Edo (1938), which is believed to be the first Japanese giant monster film. While it is understandable, but no less regrettable, how Sergei Eisenstein’s first sound film, Bezhin Meadow (1937), could have been lost during a bombing raid in World War II, it boggles the mind that something like James Dean’s screentest for the role of Curly in the musical Oklahoma! (1954) could have been so casually discarded. Of course, this was long before anyone had even conceived of something like DVD supplemental features.

What’s even more amazing is how recent some of the films on the list are, with titles and fragments from the 1960s, 70s and 80s being named.

Surely not all the films on the list are masterpieces, but they have their historical imperatives for being preserved. Undoubtedly, many of the films that we consider lost today were turkeys in their time, and probably would not attract the interest of anyone but the most diehard film historian. Even then, they may have yielded some glimmer of value. Then again, will future film historians, generations from now thank us for having the foresight to preserve something like Norbit?

2007 National Film Registry Films Announced

The Library of Congress has made its annual announcement of the 25 films to be added to the Library's National Film Registry, and as in years past, the films are a combination of modern favorites and older classics ranging from the Charley Chase silent comedy short Mighty Like The Moose (1926) and the all-star cast drama Grand Hotel (1932) to the Steve McQueen crime drama Bullitt (1968) and 1985's science-fiction comedy Back To The Future.

Also included on this year's list are the noir's In A Lonely Place (1950) and The Naked City (1948), the western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), the Walt Disney cartoon The Three Little Pigs (1933), Algonquin Roundtable member Robert Benchley's comedy short The Sex Life Of The Polyp (1928) and the musical Oklahoma! (1950).

"Even as Americans fill the movie theaters to see the latest releases, few are aware that up to half the films produced in this country before 1950—and as much as 90 percent of those made before 1920—are lost forever," said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, in a press release. "The National Film Registry seeks not only to honor these films, but to ensure that they are preserved for future generations to enjoy."

Under the terms of the National Film Preservation Act of 1992, each year the Librarian of Congress, with advice from the National Film Preservation Board, names 25 films to the National Film Registry to be preserved for all time based on their "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significance.

The films on the Registry range from silent classics Intolerance (1919) and It (1927) to popular blockbusters like Star Wars (1977) and Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981) to historically important film footage such as the Hindenburg Disaster Newsreel Footage (1937) and Abraham Zapruder's infamous home movie footage of the John F. Kennedy assassination. The complete list of films on the National Film Registry can be found here.

The complete list of films added to the Registry this year is as follows-

• Back To The Future (1985)
• Bullitt (1968)
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
• Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)
• Dances With Wolves (1990)
• Days of Heaven (1978)
• Glimpse of the Garden (1957)
• Grand Hotel (1932)
• The House I Live In (1945)
• In a Lonely Place (1950)
• The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
• Mighty Like a Moose (1926)
• The Naked City (1948)
• Now, Voyager (1942)
• Oklahoma! (1955)
• Our Day (1938)
• Peege (1972)
• The Sex Life of the Polyp (1928)
• The Strong Man (1926)
• Three Little Pigs (1933)
• Tol’able David (1921)
• Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son (1969-71)
• 12 Angry Men (1957)
• The Women (1939)
• Wuthering Heights (1939)

Welles' CITIZEN KANE Oscar Statue A Bust At Auction

An investment is only as good as the price you can get when you ultimate divest yourself of it, and it looks like the Dax Foundation's 2003 investment in the Academy Award statue awarded to Orson Welles for co-authoring the screenplay for Citizen Kane might not have been a wise move.

As we reported back in October, the Dax Foundation had purchased the Oscar statue back in 2003 and was planning to have it auctioned by Sotheby's earlier this week, hoping to earn anywhere between $800,00 and $1.2 million. However, it failed to find a bidder who would meet the minimum price that the Dax Foundation had placed on it.

Welles' personal copy of the film's 156-page script, the last revised draft before the final shooting script, was sold for $97,000 to an anonymous telephone bidder.

I have to admit to some surprise that there wasn't a single bid that met the reserve price the Oscar had on it. Since the Academy clamped down on the sale of the statues starting in 1950, very few Oscars have hit the auction block and recent years, those that have were bought up by Academy members who then donated them back to the Academy. Steven Spielberg is known to have done this on a couple of occasions and I figured the historical value of this particular Oscar would have pulled an Academy-friendly philanthropist out of the woodwork.

SUPERMAN III: It Could Have Been Worse

A few months back, I was working my way through my box set of the Christopher Reeves Superman films, when the inevitable happened. I had to watch Superman III. I hadn't seen the film all the way through since it originally ran in theaters in 1983. Loving the first two films, Superman III came as an incredible disappointment to the 14-year old me, as it did to nearly everyone else who saw the film. Watching it years later, the film's storyline of Superman fighting evil corporate magnate Robert Vaughn and bumbling computer genius Richard Pryor was just as bad, if not worse, than I remembered it to have been.

However, it turns out that Superman III could have been worse.

Much, much worse.

The folks over at Superman Cinema, the premier site for the original Reeves Superman films, have posted the original eight page story proposal for the third film written by series producer Ilya Salkind, and it is not good.

The movie still opens with getting Lois Lane out of the way - This was going to happen no matter what as Margot Kidder had been rather vocal about director Richard Donner's removal from Superman II mid-way through its production - with Clark's old hometown crush Lana Lang showing up as the Daily Planet's new hotshot reporter. Any budding romance between them is cut short though, by the arrival of Supergirl on Earth. Unlike the comics, this version of Supergirl isn't Superman's cousin, so they quickly fall for each other.

There is no intentional comedy in the outline, but the story is laughably bad. The amount of liberties taken in the synopsis would have comics fans marching on Warner Brothers with torches and pitchforks. While it is nice to see that Salkind was interested in using villains other than Lex Luthor from the comics - the superintelligent android Brainiac, who is hunting Supergirl and Mr. Mxyzptlk, a magical imp from the fifth dimension who has the power to make MS Word's spell check feature suffer a nervous breakdown - their use seems to be inconcistant and their actions are determined by what crazy action sequence Salkind wanted next. The finale of the proposal features a powerless Superman and Brainiac in a jousting match!

Don't take my word for it, head over to Superman Cinema and see for yourself.

BLADE RUNNER Location In Need Of Restoration

While it may have looked like a partly crumbling old building in its appearance in 1982's Blade Runner, real life Los Angeles landmark and sometimes movie location, The Ennis House, has not weathering the passage of time well and is now in need of $10 million dollars in repair and restoration work.

The Ennis House, designed by preeminent architect Frank Lloyd Wright, has been used as a location in various films over the years. It served as Harrison Ford’s home in Blade Runner. It was also featured as the titular House On Haunted Hill in the 1959 film where Vincent Price made an offer of $10,000 to anyone who could last the night the reputedly haunted mansion. The Ennis House has also appeared in such films as Day Of The Locust (1975), Black Rain (1989), Predator 2 (1990), The Rocketeer (1991) and The Replacement Killers (1998).

Built on a hilltop overlooking Los Angeles’ Griffith Observatory and much of the Los Angeles basin in 1924, The Ennis is not only a strong example of Wright’s design work, but of his love of experimenting with the building materials used in his designs. In the case of the Ennis, Wright employed a system of concrete blocks cast with ornamental designs on the exposed surfaces and held together with mortar and steel reinforcing. Because of the ornamental designs in the blocks, they not only hold up the structures floors and roof, they are also its finishing materials, exposing them to the elements. Such exposure caused them to wear and crumble much faster than normally expected.

By 2005, earthquakes and rain had weakened the building’s foundation to the point where there was a strong concern that it could tumble and slide down from its hilltop perch and the building was closed.

The building is now owned by the Ennis House Foundation, a private conservancy that has already stabilized it. However, they feel that there is an estimated $10 million in repair work left to restore the Ennis to its former glory.

Via The Boston Globe

Munchkins Get Walk Of Fame Star

Almost seven decades after they welcomed a twister-tossed Dorothy to the magical land of Oz, the diminutive Munchkins were welcomed to the Hollywood Walk of Fame with a presentation of their own star commerating their part in the classic The Wizard of Oz.

The ceremony was held Tuesday in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater, the same place that the film first premiered in 1939. Attending the ceremony were seven of the original 124 actors who portrayed the Munchkins, several of whom are familar faces to Wizard Of Oz fans.

"We love you. You have touched our hearts," former Munchkin Mickey Carroll,who played the the Town Crier of Munchkinland, told the crowd. Carroll was joined by Clarence Swensen, a Munchkin soldier; Jerry Maren, part of the Lollipop Guild; Karl Slover, the Main Trumpeter; Ruth Duccini, a Munchkin villager; Margaret Pelligrini, the "sleepyhead" Munchkin and Meinhardt Raabe, the coroner.

The seven arrived at the ceremony in a horse-drawn carriage. Instead of the traditonal red carpet, there was a yellow one, recalling the film's yellow brick road.

The actors who portrayed the Munchkins came from all across the United States and even Europe. Some were members of a German midget troupe who used to film as a way of escaping from the Nazis. Each actor earned $125.00 a week for their work.

Spend Thanksgiving With The Hardys!

As Thanksgiving is the one holiday steeped in Americana and there is no film series that celebrates ordinary American life like MGM's Andy Hardy series, it makes perfect sense that Turner Classic Movies will be running all 16 Andy Hardy films tomorrow, Thanksgiving, and Friday.

Set in the mythical middle America town of Carvel, the series followed the light-hearted travails of the Hardy family, though as the series progressed it became increasingly centered on young Andy Hardy (Mickey Rooney) and his father Judge James Hardy (Lionel Barrymore in the first film, A Family Affair (1937) and Lewis Stone for the rest of the series). Carvel was studio head Leo B. Mayer's idealization of what small town life was like. The people were good, honest, pious and friendly. A majority of the plots featured Andy getting into some sort of trouble, usually over girls, money or both, and eventually turns to his father for a "man to man talk" for advice on rectifying the situation.

Besides being the springboard for Rooney's career, the series also helped launch the careers of other MGM stars. Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938), the first film in the series to feature Rooney’s character’s name solely in the title, featured a young Lana Turner in one of her first screen roles. Kathryn Grayson and Esther Williams had their fuirst screen appearances in Andy Hardy’s Private Secretary (1941) and Andy Hardy’s Double Life (1942) respectively.

Love Finds Andy Hardy also saw the first of three appearances in the series by Judy Garland, playing the pesky Betsy Booth, a girl with crush on the oblivious Andy. Garland and Rooney first appeared together the previous year in Thoroughbreds Don't Cry, which proved popular enough at the boxoffice that MGM quickly paired them up for Love Finds… . In addition to the two other Andy Hardy films they would appear together in – Andy Hardy Meets Debutant (1940) and Life Begins For Andy Hardy (1941) – Roony and Garland would appear in another five musical comedies together.

A prestigious property at MGM, the Andy Hardy series had much higher production values than those found in other film series. The Andy Hardy series also stands out for the continuity between the various installments that the writers maintained. Other film series such as the The Falcon or The Saint were very episodic in nature. Only the main characters carried over from film to film and no mentions of previous adventures were ever made. However, references to the events of previous films were often made in the Andy Hardy series, especially in the first half of the run. Characters from one film, like Garland’s Betsy Booth, could show up again a few films later. Creating this continuity, if it was done intentionally, was a smart move on the writers’ part as it subtly gives characters like Andy a character arc that describes his maturity and growth into adulthood as the films progress.

The series came to an end in 1947 with Love Laughs At Andy Hardy. In the film, Andy is just returning to civilian life after having served in World War II. (Incidentally, this film is the only one of the series to mention the conflict even though several installments came out while it was raging.) But much like Andy’s struggle to return to a normal life at college, the series found that the post-War America had changed and that people were looking for something that was maybe more realistic than the mythical town of Carvel and its residents had to offer. An attempt to relaunch the series came in 1958 with Andy Hardy Comes Home, but the film only served to prove the old saying “You can’t go home again.”

Pickford Oscar Trial Location Set

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge has tentatively ruled that a lawsuit filed to halt the sale of one of two Academy Award statuettes originally awarded to silent film star Mary Pickford should be tried in Riverside County, California, home of one of Pickford's heirs.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences contends that it has the right, as per an Academy bylaw enacted in 1950, to buy back any Academy Award statuette for the nominal sum of $10.00 and has filed an injunction against the estate of Beverly Lorraine Rogers, the late second wife of Pickford's husband Buddy Rogers, to prevent its three co-executors from selling the statuettes to anyone.

Kim Boyer, niece of Beverly Rogers and one of the three co-executors of the estate claims that the Oscar they wish to sell is the one Pickford received for her work on the 1930 film Coquette and is therefore not subject to the Academy's restriction. The Academy claims that when Pickford was given a second, honorary, award in 1976, the agreement she signed that retroactively included her 1930 statuette.

Rogers, who passed away in 1999, was previously married to Pickford for 41 years until her death in 1979. Rogers received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy in 1986. Pickford won the Best Actress Oscar in 1930 for Coquette.

Previously- Academy Attempts To Block Sale Of Oscar

Via Hollywood Reporter

MEXICAN SPITFIRE Takes Over TCM

Most comedy series from the Golden Age of Hollywood relied on a specific formula to crank out installments. Universal's Blondie series always saw hapless husband Dagwood getting into one predicament after another only to be rescued by his much more sensible wife Blondie, while the Bowery Boys would get into comedic trouble just by showing up at a location.

RKO Pictures’ Mexican Spitfire series fits firmly into the formula mold, but also managed to keep itself fresh through the energy between two of its lead actors, despite the increasing staleness of some its jokes.

Turner Classic Movies will be running all eight of the Mexican Spitfire movies tomorrow starting at 9 am Eastern.

The titular spitfire of the series is Mexican actress Lupe Velez, a raven haired beauty who moved north of the boarder to pursue a career in Hollywood. Although she had landed some small roles that parlayed on her exotic beauty, it wasn't until she was cast in the lead of the 1939 RKO comedy The Girl From Mexico that she became a star. In the film, Velez starred as Carmelita, a beautiful singer who falls in love with ad man Dennis Lindsay (Donald Woods), who has hired her to sing on a radio show. Dennis' fiancée Elizabeth is none to happy with the new girl Dennis seems to be paying an inordinate amount of attention to, while Carmelita hits it off with Dennis' Uncle Matt (Leon Errol). After a little more than an hour of screwball antics, Carmelita's broken English malapropisms, slapstick and farce, Dennis and Carmelita are the ones on the way to the altar and presumable a happy ending.

The film turned out to be an audience favorite and RKO quickly put a sequel, Mexican Spitfire, into production. The plot, which capitalized on Velez’s chemistry with Errol, featured Errol in the double role of Uncle Matt and an absent-minded, high society business associate of Dennis' by the name of Lord Basil Epping. As Uncle Matt and Epping share an uncanny resemblance to each other, the plot quickly degenerates into a mistaken identity farce with Uncle Matt impersonating Epping, leading to inevitable confusion and comedy.

The success of Mexican Spitfire and the chemistry between Velez and Errol quickly cemented the formula of all subsequent series entries- the bungling Carmelita and Uncle Matt cause problems for the beleaguered Dennis. In the course of a harebrained attempt to set things right, Matt will need to impersonate Lord Epping, usually right at the same time the real Lord Epping shows up. The only thing that varied would be either the location (Mexican Spitfire Out West, 1940) or the circumstances of Carmelita’s screw up (Mexican Spitfire Sees A Ghost, 1942). In fact, the role of Carmelita’s husband Dennis became quickly inconsequential compared to the antics between Carmelita and Uncle Matt that one barely notices when the role passes from Woods to Charles “Buddy” Rogers to Walter Reed as the series progresses.

Incidentally, the sixth entry in the series, Mexican Spitfire Sees A Ghost, is notoriously remembered as the top half on a double bill it shared with Orson Welles’ Magnificent Ambersons!

But for as much fun as it appeared Velez was having making the films and that audiences were having seeing them, her life would take a tragic turn. A year after the release of what would become the series’ final entry, titled ironically Mexican Spitfire’s Blessed Event, Velez committed suicide, despondent over being pregnant out of wedlock. As a Catholic, Lupez would not even consider getting an abortion and her lover, married actor Harald Maresch, would not leave his wife for her.

Although the sordid circumstances of her death may overshadow the other facets of her life, Velez’s work in the Mexican Spitfire series stands out as an example of how a performer can overcome and elevate mediocre material.

LOONEY TUNES, POPEYE DVD Collections To Remain Uncensored

Last week I expressed some concern over the news that Warners had censored the Tom And Jerry: Spotlight Collection, Volume 3 DVD release by the removal of two cartoons that contained racial humor, wondering what effect this might have on upcoming releases in their classic Looney Tunes series.

Fortunately, the answer comes from animation historian Jerry Beck- None at all.

According to a post at Beck’s CartoonBrew blog, Beck states that both the Looney Tunes and Popeye DVD collections, which he contributes to, will remain safe from the censor's scissors.

By example, Beck posted a frame (above left) from the Frank Tashlin's 1938 cartoon Porky At The Crocadero, in which the stuttering pig briefly imitates noted big band leader Cab Calloway. It is this one gag that many feel has kept the cartoon off television for years. It should be noted that no one seems to take offense to a similar joke in the short where Porky imitates another band leader, the appropriately-named Paul Whiteman.

Beck also posted another two frames from the final suicide gag from Bob Clampett's 1944 Hare Ribbin', another joke that had been cut from television screenings of the cartoon in recent years. Beck promises an alternate ending for the cartoon will also be on the disc where it’s Bugs Bunny who pulls the trigger on the pistol.

Some fans had expressed concern for the ongoing chronological Popeye DVD releases as the next volume enters into the early years of World War II, when less than politically correct depictions of the Japanese and Germans were often included as a way of building homefront morale.

Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume Five goes on sale on October 30.

The second volume of Popeye cartoons does not have an announced release date, but is expected before the end of the year.

TOM AND JERRY DVD Censored

It looks like the third and final volume of Warner Brothers's Tom And Jerry theatrical shorts collections will not be as complete as once thought as the label has decided to drop two cartoons -- Mouse Cleaning (1948) and Casanova Cat (1951) -- from the package due to "inappropriate racial stereotypes."

In a statement released to TVShowsOnDVD.com, the studio stated "Although [The Tom And Jerry Spotlight Collection, Volume 3] is intended for mature audiences and collectors (not for children), Warner Home Video made the decision to omit these two shorts because, regardless of their historical context and artistic value, the offensiveness of certain scenes containing inappropriate racial stereotypes would diminish the enjoyment of the Collection's 35 other classic cartoons for a large segment of the audience."

Mouse Cleaning features an appearance by a character known as Mammy Two-Shoes (seen at right in Mouse Cleaning). A recurring character in the Tom and Jerry series who was een only from the shoulders down, she was a heavy-set black woman whose instructions to Tom often inspire Jerry to mischief. Mammy Two-Shoes' character was inspired by Hattie McDaniel's portrayal of Mammy in Gone With The Wind and was voiced by Lillian Randolph. In the mid-1960s, an effort was made to alter many of the cartoons Mammy Two-Shoes appeared in, including Mouse Cleaning, by editing out her appearances and adding new animation of a white woman and/or replacing Randolph’s voice work with that of June Foray’s.

In Mouse Cleaning, Mammy Two-Shoes warns Tom that she has just finished cleaning the house and that he better not dirty things up. Needless to say, Jerry proceeds to try and create as big a mess as he can. The film ends with Jerry arranging for a coal delivery to be dumped into the house's living room, burying both Tom and Mammy Two-Shoes. Tom's head emerges from the coal, his face in blackface, and talks to Mammy Two-Shoes in a stereotypical black dialect. Although Mammy's appearance remained unchanged in this cartoon, her lines were re-recorded to eliminate her racially stereotypical accent. Most copies of the cartoon that have aired on television omit this last scene.

Casanova Cat finds Tom heading to the city to woo a rich and pretty female cat, with Jerry as a gift for her. Although Mammy Two-Legs is not in this cartoon, there is another blackface joke. In this case, Jerry's face is blackened with cigar smoke by Tom who then forces the mouse to do a minstrel-like dance. This scene has usually been cut from television airings.

I have to admit that I am more than a bit upset and insulted by this course of action from Warners. In their release, the studio clearly states their Tom And Jerry Spotlight Collections have been “intended for mature audiences and collectors (not for children).” Yet they still feel the need to protect us from this material, stating that they did not want to “diminish the enjoyment of [the set’s] other classic cartoons.”

I think Warners is severely underestimating the intelligence of its audience, or at least mine. I think that most adults can watch or read something that has racist overtones in it and can reject those racist notions but still admire the non-racist elements of the work. We’re not even talking about a film like Griffith's Birth Of A Nation (1915) or Riefenstahl's Triumph Of The Will, two films that are studied and admired for their technical achievements but not for the themes that permeate the works. These are cartoons, where the offensive, racial joke only adds up to a small fraction of the run time of the shorts.

How difficult would it have been to have the two cartoons mastered on the DVD with both an "original" and "edited" version using seemless branching? I’d hazard not difficult at all. Instead, Warners took the easy way out and decided that it is better to just chuck the two cartoons into the back of the archive and hope that everyone forgets about them in time. This is revisionist history at its worse.

Now I'm no big Tom and Jerry fan. I don't own any of the previous DVD releases, so I can't tell you if Warners has used any alternate edits of the cartoons that eliminate the Mammy Two-Shoes character. I do have to wonder though if this is some new policy at Warner Home Video. Will this effect the possibility of other cartoons held by Warners from being released, specifically Warner Brothers own "Censored Eleven" and the handful of other shorts that have been out of circulation for years due to their content? I hope not.

In their original form, these cartoons are important documents showing us where society was in terms of race relations at the time they were made. While the blackface gags in the Tom and Jerry shorts don't appear to be mean-spirited in anyway, they do illustrate the casual attitude towards such things nearly sixty years ago.

And you can't tell how far we've come if you don't have some sign posts in your rearview mirror.

Academy Attempts To Block Sale Of Oscar Statuettes

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the bestowers of the Academy Awards, is filing suit in Los Angeles Superior Court to block the sale of Oscar statuettes that originally belonged to silent film stars Mary Pickford and Charles "Buddy" Rogers.

According to a story in the Hollywood Reporter, the Academy has filed the injunction against the estate of Beverly Lorraine Rogers, the late wife of Buddy Rogers, to prevent its three co-executors from selling the statuettes to anyone. The Academy is also asking the court to grant them the right to repurchase them from the estate for the price of $10 per statuette.

According to a stipulation enacted by the Academy in 1950, Oscar winners and their heirs are prohibited from selling the famous gold awards without first selling them back to the Academy for the nominal sum of $1.00. This controversial rule does not apply to Academy Awards won before 1950, and several older Oscars have been sold at auction and by private dealers for sums in the six-figure range.

Rogers, who passed away in 1999, was previously married to Pickford for 41 years until her death in 1979. Rogers received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy in 1986. Pickford won a Best Actress Oscar in 1930 for work on Coquette. She was also given an honorary Oscar in 1976 for her entire body of silent film work.

It is unknown if the Academy is trying to include Pickford’s pre-1950 ban Oscar for Coquette in the injunction.

Andy Hardy's Dilemma

So this past Saturday night I fall asleep on the couch watching Turner Classics’ all-night William Powell-Myrna Loy marathon. No biggie, though, as I’ve seen all 13 of their collaborations numerous times, even the rather gloomy Evelyn Prentice (1934). So somewhere around the last part of Love Crazy (1941), with William Powell running around in drag trying to pull a fast on over on his overly suspicious mother-in-law, I drifted off to sleep, only to awaken next morning to the sound of Mickey Rooney and Lewis Stone - Andy Hardy and his father Judge Hardy - having what sounded like one of the famous “man to man” talks.

“Well, that’s a nice programming idea for Father’s Day,” I thought to myself. Sure, MGM’s Andy Hardy series may owe more to studio head Louis B. Mayer’s skewed idea of what middle America was like than to reality, but the father son dynamic between Stone and Rooney certainly fit the bill for nice, Father’s Day fare.

That is, until a moment later when I realized that what TCM was showing wasn’t any of the 16 feature length Andy Hardy films at all, but a 20 minute, one-reel short entitled Andy Hardy’s Dilemma, the bastard step-child of the series, rightfully forgotten by most people except for, apparently, those who work in TCM’s programming department.

Released in 1938, the short starts off innocently enough with young Andy Hardy driving along in his car, daydreaming of marrying his sweetheart Polly Benedict, Hardy series regular Ann Rutherford in a dialogue-less cameo. One bad dip in the road later and the whole back end of Andy’s car has fallen off. Figuring that it will cost about $200.00 for a new car, Andy goes to his father for a loan. Judge Hardy says that he was going to donate a like sum to charity, but would give it to Andy instead.

His father’s quick agreement should have alerted Andy that the Judge had something up his sleeve. While taking a potential new car out for a test drive, Judge Hardy has Andy drive by a public daycare center for working mothers. One look at the little moppets at play is enough to tell his dad to donate $50.00 of the $200.00 to the daycare center and he can settle for a car worth about $150.00. What comes afterwards should be painfully obvious to even those who have never seen any of the Andy Hardy series. While test driving successively cheaper cars, Judge Hardy has Andy stop by various charities around town including an All Nations Community House, a children’s osteopathic hospital and finally a Salvation Army Home for Women. Each stop is accompanied by a $50.00 donation to said charity. Finally Andy decides he can fix his old car for about ten bucks before Lewis Stone turns to the camera and gives the audience a stern talking to about donating to local charities. I have to say that this speech is the only time I have ever heard the phrase “Community Chest” used outside of a game of Monopoly.

What’s curious about this is the underlying premise that the small, bucolic town portrayed in the Andy Hardy series is actually prone to the many real world problems that Mayer had wanted to keep out of his cinematic suburbia. Since this short was produced early in the run of Andy Hardy films, it suddenly casts a pale light on the lighthearted antics of Andy and his friends in the films that follow. And please don’t get me started on the ham-fisted way that Stone’s Judge Hardy teaches Andy about extending a helping hand to those less fortunate.

But what’s even more curious, and at some level appalling, is the film’s depiction of the Salvation Army Home for Women. The film’s unseen narrator describes the place as “first of all, a maternity hospital.” However, he continues with, “[It is] a refuge where can be brought back to normal the mental system of a girl who has been shocked unduly by a great social problem.” The hospital, we are told, is happy to indulge any mother who wishes to be known by her first name only and once baby and mother are both healthy, the organization will find the mother a job where she can keep her infant nearby with “the belief that with her own child growing up beside her, a girl isn’t going to make the same mistake again.”

While it’s true that the Production Code only allowed for vague references at best to unwed mothers, this short really comes off condescending in its implication that unwed mothers are all mentally unbalanced. And although the narration makes no judgment on these women, outside of the slight tone of pity in narrator Carey Wilson’s voice, the segment’s opening shot of the hospital’s nursing staff that dissolves to a painting on the wall of Jesus praying in the Garden at Gethsemane speaks volumes.

We've come a long way since then baby.