FredCDobbs
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Posts posted by FredCDobbs
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He told me that he was living in Seattle or some place north of LA when he was about to turn 20. He said he and a brother or a cousin discussed future careers and they decided to go to Hollywood to see if they could get into the movies as actors.
He said he went around to the studios and no one needed him, but one studio (I think Warner Brothers) just happened to need someone who could do voices for cartoons, so they did a test with him. He said he didn't know he could do voices for cartoons. He said he had never thought about it before. But he did some funny voices for them and was hired.
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> The majority of Mel Blanc's career was doing all the
> voices in the Warner Bros. Cartoons.
I met Mel back in the late '70s. I did an interview with him for a CB radio magazine. He used to go on the air and talk to people around LA and tourists driving through town. He would do his Warner Brothers cartoon voices. People said he was very good and sounded just like the characters. When he told them he WAS the characters, they didn't believe him.
He was a very nice guy and had hundreds of old stories about Hollywood.
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> "I'm a Medford Man. Medford Oregon."
>
> -- Jackson (Hall) in DOUBLE INDEMNITY
>
> And Hall was the sour studio executive, Mr. Hadrian,
> in Preston Sturges's incomparable SULLIVAN'S
> TRAVELS, and Jack McCall, the weasely assassin of
> Wild Bill Hickok in DeMille's THE PLAINSMAN.
>
> Yes, he was a splendid, versatile actor.
>
> It's interesting that Hall's character, Mr Boot,
> performs the same basic function in Wilder's ACE
> IN THE HOLE -- the basically incorruptible moral
> yardstick against which all other characters are
> measured -- as Edward G. Robinson's Barton Keyes does
> in the director's DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Wilder
> and his co-writers (and James M. Cain) realized that
> a reader's or viewer's notions of morality are too
> subjective and fluid for them to perform this
> function themselves; consequently, characters such as
> Keyes and Boot are necessary to lay down the ethical
> framework, and draw moral lines in the sand, that men
> like Walter Neff and Chuck Tatum then cross on their
> inevitable path to oblivion.
Good point. This is one of the reasons for the Hays Code. Many films in the late '20s and early '30s had no moral yardstick and as a result the themes were drifting toward murder, corruption, and prostitution, with no punishment for the guilty. The same thing has happened in many modern movies.
I saw a recent BBC television production of "Rebecca" in which Mr. DeWinter admits to the new Mrs. DeWinter that he murdered his first wife because she was no danged good. So Mr. and Mrs. DeWinter successfully go through the rest of the film covering up his murder, and they get away with it. Not a good thing to teach kids and teenagers in the TV audience.
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I met all kinds of people in the news business over the years. The most frightening I ever met was Werner von Braun. I wasn?t actually introduced to him, but I had to take some movies of him from about 8 feet away. I had a bright movie light that I had to turn on and he didn?t like the light shining in his eyes. He scowled at me. The guy was frightening. 18 years earlier he could have had me shot for shining the light in his eyes like that.
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Yes, if you don?t mind, let me know. I have maps of the area and I?ve been to some of the other locations nearby. For example, Natural Bridges National Monument is about 65 miles to the North of Monument Valley. Chinle and Canyon de Chelley (pronounced de Shay) is about 103 drive miles to the Southeast of the town of Kayenta.
The ancient village of Second Mesa on the Hopi reservation is about 65 miles Southeast of Tuba City. The Winslow meteor crater is about 65 miles East of Flagstaff. The Petrified Forest is about 110 miles East of Flagstaff. North of there a few miles is the Painted Desert.
http://www.arizona-leisure.com/painted-desert.html
The old Painted Desert Inn was used in one scene in ?The Grapes of Wrath? as the Joad family drove to California. This Inn used to be on the old 2-lane Route 66 back in the 1930s.
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/harrison/harrison28.htm
About 190 miles East of Flagstaff is Gallup, NM, which is the most Native American town in the US. The cliffs West of town on the North side of the highway is where they made ?The Big Carnival?. You can get to Gallup by going East out of Kayenta, then South to Chinle, then further South to Window rock, then Southeast to Gallup, then you can go back West on I-40. Gallup has the lowest prices on Indian jewelry. The place to stay in Gallup is the El Rancho Hotel. The main old hotel part (not the new motel part) is where a lot of movie stars stayed when they were making Western and Arabian films in the deserts and mountains around Gallup in the ?30s and ?40s.
The main thing to see is the Grand Canyon, which is about 75 miles Southwest of Tuba City. You can get a full view of this place in a day, but a year at the place would be more helpful. For less expensive motels in the area, try Tuba City and Cameron.
On a separate trip, you can actually go on an interesting train trip from Los Angeles to Gallup via Amtrak. I think the trip lasts 13 hours. Leave LA Union Station in the late afternoon and arrive in Gallup the next morning. Many movies were made about this train route which goes all the way up to Chicago. You can rent a car in Gallup to drive around town.
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That sounds a little like "Leave Her to Heaven" (1945)
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0037865/
With Gene Tierney and Cornel Wilde.
The crazy lady is the guy's wife. They live in a cabin in the woods near a big lake and they have to get there by a small motor boat.
The lady is jealous of all her husband's friends, so she kills herself and set it up so that her husband will be blamed. He goes to jail for some time and is then released.
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I finally solved a mystery tonight that I had beed wondering about for years. A very good old actor played the Gowrie father in "Intruder in the Dust". He was the mean old **** man, and in the film he really looked like a many old **** man.
I didn't recognize him but he seemed like an accomplished actor. In the film he has only one arm. I don't know if they hid his missing arm or if he really did lose it in an operation.
Anyway, there were several Gowries listed in the film, and I didn't recognize the names of any of the actors who played them.
Tonight I saw the actor who played the newspaper publisher, Jacob Boot, in "The Big Carnival." In this film the actor put on a hat in a certain way, and then I recognized him as the guy who played the father, Nub Gowrie, in "Intruder in the Dust."
This actor, Porter Hall, played the guilty man in "the Thin Man". He was in many mystery films in the 1930s. He was Bette Davis' father in "The Petrified Forest." This guy was really a great actor.
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Gouldings should be a good place. There should be plenty of ghosts around there.
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Three-camera Cinerama was merely a novelty format to start with. Much like Imax, and the CircleRama theater at the 1964-65 New York World?s fair. It used 10 cameras and the film was shown in 360 degrees. We had to stand up to be able to move around and see the whole screen.
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I never cared much for Cinerama. A new theater opened in New Orleans in the early ?60s and I saw How the West was Won. I thought the image was distorted, the three lenses on the cameras were wide-angle lenses which distorted the image when people walked across the screen. The two vertical lines were often hidden by well-placed trees but I got tired of seeing well-placed trees throughout the movie.
In the bigger regular Cinemascope theaters the film image was very high quality and very wide, but with none of the distortions of Cinerama. A viewer had to sit in the center of the theater in order to see the full Cinerama screen. The people who sat off to either side of center couldn?t see all of the screen.
I don?t understand why so many people wasted so much money on this crude three-camera process.
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> Hey Fred.....just my opinion but your instructions
> sound more like "Survivor" instead of a vacation.
> New York City sounds like Disney World compared to
> Monument Valley! LOL
> Bartlett
Lol, it is actually less dangerous here than in New York or Los Angeles, but some big city folks don?t know the rules out here.
It?s like that family up in Oregon that decided to take a ?short cut? from I-5 to the Coast Highway in the winter a couple of months ago. They were stranded in the snow for a couple of weeks. Several years ago a man did the same thing on that same road and he was stranded in the snow for two months, until he died of starvation. He spent two months less than 30 air miles from Grants Pass. But the road was very winding and covered with snow, so he couldn?t walk out. They were less than 30 air miles from a major town, but they got lost by taking a road they didn?t know anything about, especially in the winter.
Reminds me of a time I was on a trip to Los Corralitos Honduras. We drove out of Tegucigalpa for 13 hours to get to the place. It seemed to be about as far away from civilization as anyone could get. But after I got there I studied a map and saw that we were only about 30 air miles from Tegucigalpa.
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Lz, by the way, I hope you get to Monument Valley this summer. I was there years ago, but I can?t find my photos of the place. It?s not far to drive, but it is off the main highways. I think there is still one building still standing, across the highway to the West of the Park, that was in one of John Wayne?s movies.
If you see any Indian ladies or men dressed up in old type costumes, they are there for you to photograph but you need to ask them how much they charge for a photo. They are not there for free.
You need to be sure you reserve a motel room in advance, since there aren?t many motels in the area. There should be some in Kayenta and Tuba City. Be sure you take your cell phones. Don?t drive off any paved road onto any dirt road unless it is at the Park. Take some extra food and water with you.
If Indian men approach you in a town they just want some whiskey money, so give them a buck or so. Generally you won?t be in danger of being scalped. However, it?s best not to go driving around in that area at night, since there are some teenage gangs that sometimes rob tourists (like anywhere else).
Let people back home know where you will be going, each highway route you will take, if you change routes, and don?t go off the main highways.
And don?t forget that the Grand Canyon is in the vicinity too, but I?ve heard that the Grand Canyon motels are very expensive during peak tourist season now.
If you want to know about some other interesting places in that area, let me know.
Fred
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> Fred,
>
> While I appreciate that you have that much confidence
> in me, I must defer and let you handle this one.
>
>
Ok, I confess. I don't really know much about the different formats.
The most common for movies has always been 35 mm. But I've seen documentaries that say some of the early non-Edison cameras might have used different sized film.
When the early moviemakers were trying to break the Edison patent on the whole invention of the movie camera in general, some used specially designed cameras with film that had no perforations in it. The cameras punched the perfs in the film as the film rolled through the camera.
I think the Supreme Court finally ruled that no one can hold a patent on a major invention, and that they could hold a patent only on specific variations of that invention, such as a specific camera or car design.
Edison tried to keep a solid hold on his overall patent of all motion picture cameras and projectors, but finally the court ruled that that would be an industrial monopoly.
There were some early experiments with 60 mm film, but they failed because of the lack of theaters that could show the films.
There was a French film made in the 1920s that used three cameras and three projectors and an ultra-wide screen for the last reel of the film. I saw a presentation of this film in San Francisco in the ?70s, but since theaters had to buy additional projectors, this format never caught on. Later when Cinerama was invented, that used three separate cameras and a special 70 mm projector and the showing of Cinerama films was limited to being shown only in a special theater that was equipped with the special projectors.
Early Cinerama had a flaw, which was two obvious vertical lines on the screen where the images of the three cameras joined. Then later a Cinerama camera was invented that used wide film and only one camera.
When Cinemascope was first used it required a large additional lens to be added to the front of the camera lens and the projector lens, plus it required the wide expansion of theater screens.
When early copies of Cinemascope pictures were made for TV, they copied only the center portion of the image. This led to some problems such as when there were two people talking, with one on one side of the screen and the other on the other side, on the TV image neither person could be seen. So someone finally invented a ?pan and scan? printer that allowed the Cinemascope image to be panned left and right.
Of course there was the famous Technicolor camera that used three rolls of black and white film and the older two-strip Technicolor cameras that used two rolls of black and white film. Filters inside the cameras split the three-color image into red, blue, and yellow-green, and the two strip used a blue-green and orange filter.
For every different kind of film format, a special printer had to be designed in order to convert the format to a square image for TV and for small theaters that could not afford the special projection equipment.
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I swear I?ve seen variations on this film before. The gangland doctor, the hero fed going to prison to get in with the gang. The crook?s sister, the rain storm, etc., and especially the elevator for the gangster?s car in the hide-out.
But I don?t remember seeing it with Chester Morris.
Did Cagney do one like this?
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This is from 1936. It was on TCM a week or so ago, and starred Jean Harlow, Franchot Tone, Cary Grant, and Lewis Stone.
This was a delightful film. It was post-code but still interesting with these characters. What struck me the most was that Jean Harlow was really a good actress in this film. As a matter of fact, since it didn?t have any usual Harlow ****-**** stuff in it, this makes me think she was a very good actress all along.
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Lol, just joking, Lizzy. Ha, ha.
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> I've always used the quotation marks... It will work
> with them, I just didn't know it could work without
> them!
Lol, I didn't know it would work with them!
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> Fred,
>
> Okay...here's a challenge. Briefly discuss
> ALL moving film formats. I count about 150 different
> formats (listed on Wikipedia). You can charge me
> whatever suits you.
>
> Rusty
This is such an easy topic, I'll let my assistant, lzcutter, discuss it.
Fred
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When you open the first window in Tiny Pic, click on "Browse" and that will open up a new window which will be for your own computer files. Search around in that window for the photo you want to upload.
You usually can't post a photo directly from your computer to a message board, but you can upload it to Tiny Pic from your computer and then download it from Tiny Pic to the message board, using the url address that Tiny Pic gives you.
You might want to save all your uploaded photo url addresses in a Word document, with a title for each of them, so you can find pictures and their urls later.
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> Bobhopefan:
> I want to thank you and FredCDobbs for clueing me in.
> You don't really insert the photo, but rather code in
> a URL site where the photo is located.
Right, I guess we forgot to tell you that.
You can usually find the url address of a photo on the internet by right clicking on the photo and then clicking on "Properties". That should give you the url address that you are looking for.
If you have a photo in your own computer, such as a personal photo, and you need a url address for it, you can go here and upload it to this website.
This will take you to a page where you can search your own photo files in your computer and upload one picture at a time.
Don't do anything on your computer while the photo is uploading, because that might mess up the upload if you do anything.
Also, try not to upload any photos that are above 250 kb in size. The program can upload them but the upload time will be much longer.
Then after the upload is complete, the website will give you a simple short url address for your photo. Use it and the code we gave you to post it here.
Fred
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Fred said:
"So, Lz, I think you are trying to say that there are
a lot of old films still in vaults that have not been
copied and have not been dubbed to any kind of tape,
and we want to see copies of ALL THE DANGED FILMS
that Hollywood still has in its vaults, right? But,
some of those film have some problems such as film
damage, so it's not an easy matter of just going to
the vault, taking out an old copy of an old film and
dubbing it directly to a tape, since many of the old
films need some kind of repair or restoration before
they can be dubbed."
Lz said:
>Fred,
>
> Yes, that's what I've been trying to get across to
> folks for over a year now.
Fred says:
I charge .50 a paragraph to take vast amounts of verbiage and condense it down into one coherent paragraph. You owe me .50 cents.
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> Can you guys help figure out which is my elbow?
Your left elbow looks like this <
This is your right elbow >
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Bobhopefan is right. This is the basic photo code, but replace the ( with a < before you post it.
(IMG src="insertimageurlhere">
Where her code says:
?insertimagehere?
that?s where you insert the url code of the photo, but leave off the quote marks.
My code has the pixel size numbers in it so you can reduce a large photo to a small one. Try not to post any large photos.
Written On The Wind Essential?
in General Discussions
Posted
> I don't question the film. I believe I made several
> statements to the contrary. Films are like any other
> art--open to many interpetations.
>
> Some people will see one theme in a movie while
> another person will see things entirely differently.
> I offer my views as just that--my interpetation of
> the film. If someone does not see things my way
> that's OK.
You are right about that and that's a good point.
For me, the movie puts me to sleep after about 10 minutes. If I want to hear people talk about other people and about their own problems, I'll go to work or get together with some of my friends.