FredCDobbs
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Posts posted by FredCDobbs
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This is a rare film with Joan Crawford. It is based on the "Sadie Thompson" story. This film is one of the reasons the Hays Code went into effect in 1934.
A must-see and must-record for all classic film lovers.
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Thanks for the information about General LaMay. The reason I think the characters were based on Walker was because Walker was handing out John Birch Society literature to his troops in Berlin, although such propagandizing by a General was not allowed. There were certain things he said to his troops that made it clear he thought it might be a good idea if we attached the Russians before they had a chance to stockpile a large number of atomic and hydrogen bombs (although by the early ?60s that was already too late).
There were some European communist newspapers that began to attack him and call for his removal from being in charge of all our troops. They said that he might do something to provoke the Russians and then might attack the Russians on his own, without orders from Congress or the President.
I think LaMay, MacArthur, and Patton got into trouble because of public statements they made, but not because of any Presidential fear that they were going to organize a coup or a revolution or a war. Walker was the type of guy who could easily go around talking to other Generals about getting together to overrule a Presidential order.
He got into trouble in late 1962, because he had given some speeches to John Birch Society crowds, suggesting that every able-bodied man of the South should go to the campus of the University of Mississippi to keep the feds from integrating the school in September. Many of them did, and a riot erupted on campus late at night on September 30th. A mob of about 200 to 300 armed **** fought with about 200 US Marshals. The mob actually fired on the Marshals with shotguns and rifles and wounded some of them. I was there. I saw the battle.
Walker turned up on campus late that night, cheering the mob onward toward the Administration building, where the Marshals were holed up. Kennedy, in the mean time, ordered in federal Troops from the New York and New Jersey area, and he pulled all the local Mississippi National Guardsmen off campus.
The state governor had called up the local National Guard, but Kennedy federalized them, fearing the governor would order them to also battle the US Marshals. Kennedy didn?t dare use the Mississippi National Guardsmen to try to put down the riot, so, the Marshals were out-numbered for several hours before the Northern Federal troops arrived on campus.
The next day Robert Kennedy ordered Walker arrested and charged with rebellion and civil insurrection. The case took a long time to go to court. In the meantime, JFK was shot and killed in Dallas the next year. Walker lived in Dallas at the time, and he was suspected by some people of being involved with the assassination. But I don?t think he was.
Those were exciting times.
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> Burt Lancaster in Seven Days in May. You
> could easily imagine the megalomaniacal General Scott
> ordering "traitors" to be shot by firing squads, if
> he got his hands on the levers of power.
That character was modeled after General Edwin A. Walker. Kennedy removed him from command of our troops in Europe around ?60 or ?61 and reassigned him to some base in Texas. Walker rejected that and resigned, then went on a speaking tour for the John Birch Society insinuating that Kennedy was a communist supporter and was selling us out to the communists. Several movies were made using the Walker model, such as ?Dr. Strangelove?. There is a similar General in ?Spies Like Us?.
I photographed Walker once or twice while in the news business, and I finally got to interview him in the early 1980s in his home in Dallas. Yikes! He was so far right, he thought J. Edgar Hoover sold out to the communists.
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Lol, I can just see Julia Roberts going to work in Hollywood for another boring day of editing film. We see her looking over the Zapruder film on a flatbed and we learn that she is working on a JFK documentary, then she unwraps a small box that has a postmark of Dallas but no return address. Inside she finds an old roll of 8mm film. She has to go dig out an old 8mm movie projector out of a closet in the office where she works, and as she rolls the film, we see various intense expressions on her face, then we cut to the 8mm film, then go in for a closer look, then a closer look (like in the film ?Blow-up?). No dialogue is needed here, since we can see the man with the rifle hiding behind the curved wall up on the knoll. She sends the film to a lab to have it enlarged and she makes a few phone calls about it, and that?s how the word begins to leak out to the various conspirators. We see scenes of her various cell phone calls being traced and routed through a mysterious office in Washington DC. All of the conspirators are old by now, but they are still mean and they start going after her, trying to get their hands on that 8mm film.
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> There are no movies about film editors,
Why don?t you contact John Grisham and tell him he should write a novel about a female film editor who is working on a documentary about the JFK assassination, and she discovers some never-before-seen amateur movie of the motorcade, and while she?s editing the various films of the motorcade she begins to see a blurry image of a man dressed in a policeman?s uniform aiming a gun and firing a shot from the grassy knoll. He is more clearly seen in the newly discovered 8mm film that you are working on.
Then word gets out, and the conspirators began to chase you. First, all over Hollywood, then they blow up your car out in the San Fernando Valley. Then you flee to New York were they chase you all over Brooklyn and Manhattan, blowing up your hotel room. Then you don a disguise and flee down to Washington, where you meet secretly with a handsome Washington Post reporter. Then the conspirators chase both of you all over Washington. Etc, etc.
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Green Dolphin Street (1947) is coming on TCM on Wednesday morning around 11:45. Check the schedule to be sure of the day and time.
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I don't think nitrate film could be recycled in any way. They tended to save a lot of out-takes for use in other films, as Jack said.
I never found out why they used nitrate. I have some 16 mm film my father shot in 1938 but it is not on nitrate stock.
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I wanna see it in the theater on the big screen!
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TCM ran commercials for this film every day for nearly a month, so where is it? It hasn't turned up in my 18-theater town yet.
How about you? Has anyone here seen it?
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> Needless to say, I am so disappointed in
> TCM's influx of post 50's movies which
> not only can I rent, but also watch on
> TNT and a lot of other stations.
> In my opinion, TCM is selling out and losing
> the wonderful uniqueness this station
> was founded for.
I agree. I haven't watched TCM all month. I've been watching classics on DVD and tape.
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Well of course, and look at all the famous actors in Hollywood who used stunt doubles then received movie awards as actors.
I want to be entertained, and I don't care how they do it. If they can make me believe that a bunch of green foam rubber is a talking frog and pink foam rubber is a singing lady pig, then that's ok with me.
Didn't Bugs Bunny win some awards, while it was really Mel Blanc doing his voice?
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I never understood this story.
The article said they received a Grammy which was taken back because they never sung on their records.
Well.......SOMEBODY sung on their records, so why didn't the real singers get the Grammy?
This is just like all the movies where the stars pretended to sing yet other people were really doing the singing.
Doh, what's wrong with that?
Two guys on stage, two different guys singing. It was a four-man act. What's wrong with that?
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Was the film shot in mostly a desert area? With some desert hills and rocks and dirt roads? Not too many people in the movie?
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Boring.
I tried to sit through this film several years ago, but I could only stand about 45 minutes of it.
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> The whole thing was really awfull....I remember
> seeing the footage of John Landis in Court or being
> questioned or something...and the jerk had a smile on
> his face......
Yeah, I saw that. He was smiling while in the courtroom listening to the testimony. He might have been doing that on purpose, trying to seem to not be guilty. After all, it was a pyrotechnics accident. Also I think there might have been a second trial regarding the kids. They were working beyond the legal hours for kids in movies.
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> Could you tell by Vic's reaction that he had any idea
> of what was about to happen? Did he know the chopper
> was out of control?
No, he was struggling to get across the river, and the helicopter was behind him. He never saw it coming. The kids didn't either. They knew it was behind them as part of the movie, but they didn't know anything was wrong. As far as they knew, everything was ok. It happened very fast. It took everyone by surprise.
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> > I'm not suggesting we look through rose colored
> > glasses at the past.I am simply answering the
> title
> > of this thread about sexism in classic movies
> stating
> > that the originator of this thread is holding a
> > modern day mirror up to society in the past.
>
> I think that to some extent classsic movies reflected
> the society that created them. Although once the
> Production Code started to be enforced in 1934 they
> really reflected the values of a small but vociferous
> minority of that society, rather than the society as
> a whole.
That?s not true. What happened was that by the late 1920s so many films were being made about prostitutes, drunks, criminals, and drug addicts, the general public got fed up with it. They wanted movies, but they didn?t want every movie to be about sex, drugs, and prostitutes. Can you think of many early films where Crawford, Dietrich, Stanwick, Harlow and Garbo didn?t play whores and prostitutes?
The public got fed up and they organized lobby groups all over the country to try to get Hollywood to stop making trashy movies. By the early ?30s as many as 8 US states had their own codes and censorship laws. Lobby groups were trying to get the US congress to pass a national censorship code similar to the new FCC code. So there were 8 states where Hollywood couldn?t even show many of their movies. And with the threat of a national censorship law, such as the ones enacted in England and other European countries, they decided to clean up their act and form their own ?decency? bureau to stop all the state and federal legislation. They made millions and billions of dollars as a result as more people began returning to the theaters. The same thing should be done today. If you want to watch pornography, drive to Juarez or Tijuana.
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Warning... gross story follows......
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All three of them were decapitated. It was instant.
Morrow was crossing the river while carrying one kid under each arm. They were up to their necks in the water.
Pyrotechnics were going off to represent the Americans shelling them.
A helicopter comes into the scene and fires some rockets at them. Mortar shells are going off in the air. All of this pyrotechnic stuff of Hollywood is designed to have no metal parts in it. It?s basically cardboard fireworks that puts out a lot of flame but no projectiles.
However, a mortar shell went off near the helicopter?s tail rotor and something, a chunk of cardboard maybe, hit the tail rotor and disabled it. So the helicopter went out of control. It dipped down, with the tail in the air, and the main rotor blades scraped the water and cut off their heads. Their heads went flying off into the air. Then the helicopter crashed into the water.
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Do you know how he was killed? I mean, exactly how?
I saw the studio film of the whole thing. The court in California forced the studio to turn over the film, and then NBC got a copy of it and sent it to all NBC affiliates. Not many of them actually ran the film, but we got to study it in our editing room at a local station.
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Here?s one of the Sandinista dames in Nicaragua. See the gun in her belt.
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I like "Under Fire" (1983)
It's about a film cameraman and a reporter in Nicaragua during the revolution in 1979. It is based roughly on the shooting by the National Guard of ABC reporter Bill Stewart in 1979.
I was a cameraman back in those days and I was in Nicaragua after Somoza fled the country and after the Sandinistas captured all the National Guard offices and forts. In that case, the Sandinista revolutionaries were much nicer than the National Guard.
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Thank you.
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I saw just a very small segment of that movie, and I noticed that it looked strange.
First, it looked like a 16 mm print rather than a 35 mm print. And it did look like it was photographed through dirty glass or by being projected onto a dirty white wall.
It's possible that this is a problem that went back as far as the 1950s when the 16 mm print was made. I think some early printers had glass in-between the 35 mm and 16 mm films when the printing process too place. I'm not sure, but it might have been that they had to use an optical printer to go from 35 mm down to 16 mm, and if so, then that system used a lens that might have been dirty.
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> Does anyone know--I just heard for black and white
> films, red shows up darker than black--is that true?
>
> TIA
It can under certain circumstances. It depends on the type of film used, the type of color filter used, and the type of "black" that is being photographed.
Early film was orthochromatic.
See this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthochromatic
This is basically why American Indians looked so dark in early films and 19th Century photographs. They have a lot of red in their skin. In person, they look redish brown.
If you photograph a black glossy card, that will usually be the blackest you can get on B&W film. For example, most titles for B&W films, especially for low budget films, are made up of white letters on a glossy black card, so the white will show up but none of the black will show up.
However, if you photograph black satin, felt, or other non-glossy black cloth, it can reflect a lot of light and appear to be gray rather than black.
Many outdoor scenes in B&W westerns were filmed with a red filter over the lens, and that makes the blue sky blacker or darker.
Most Menacing Peerformance as an American Public Official
in General Discussions
Posted
Yes, the basic ?Executive Action? story line, with Texas oil millionaires in Dallas orchestrating the assassination, was published in Moscow a couple of days after the assassination. The Russians were quick to jump on the ?conspiracy? bandwagon, because they didn?t want Oswald to be blamed, out of a fear that a right-wing reaction might put Barry Goldwater in the White House in 1964. ?Executive Action? is one of the most communistic films ever made in Hollywood, and in it Will Geer and Dalton Trumbo were finally free to promote their true communistic feelings about the United States. Geer was also in the communist film, ?Salt of the Earth?, a few years earlier. It was produced and acted mainly by CPUSA members.
I don?t believe in conspiracy theories either. I did a lot of journalistic work studying the case and I?m sure Oswald did it alone. The communists and far-left writers and film makers wanted to take the blame off of him, and they are the ones who started the conspiracy theory industry that still continues.
If you want to hear Oswald?s true political views, listen to this interview conducted with him on Aug. 17, 1963:
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/audio/oswald1.rm
Kennedy?s gone, LBJ?s gone, Nixon?s gone, but Oswald?s hero, Castro, is still in power as a dictator in Cuba.