FredCDobbs
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Posts posted by FredCDobbs
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> After Mr Gower, Warner's biggest role is as the
> avuncular lama, Chang, in Capra's LOST
> HORIZON.
I think he is best remembered as Chang.
Also, he played Chen Tsu in "The Adventures of Marco Polo"
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Oh boy, here are some audio excerpts from a George Lewis Jazz recording from the 1960s. I have this record. I used to hear this guy and his band live at Preservation Hall in 1963-64. An old friend of mine introduced me to Lewis.
A white British version of ?Down by the Riverside? was in the movie tonight.
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I remember in '63-'65, every now and then, one of the bands would travel to England to play a series of concerts and they made a lot of money doing that.
Also, every now and then, some young British guys would come over and hire a band for a day -- for about $500 -- they would rent an old dance hall (plenty of them in the black neighborhoods) and they would record a couple of hours of the bands, and then go back to England and release new record albums of their music. This was the last of the real 1920s jazz bands.
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Dang, I didn't record it. I didn't know they would have all that jazz stuff in it.
I used to go to Preservation Hall back in the early '60s. I think it was started around 1960s by a young guy and his wife from the North. He went around New Orleans rounding up as many old Jazz guys he would find. Many of them no longer played in bands, since the music had gone out of style with the Big Band era of the 1940s. Many of the old guys were either retired or worked as janitors.
The young guy got them all back together and they were still as good as they had been in the 1920s and '30s. when I lived there, I didn't fully realize what a rare era in history I was living in, because within the next 15 to 20 years all of the old-timers would be gone.
Preservation Hall was a small room in an old building in the French Quarter. It would only seat about 100 people at a time, but it was a very popular place.
I even photographed a few old Jazz funerals in '63 and '64, with a sound camera and with some of the old guys playing in the bands. I've still got some of that old film. I need to find it and try to sell it to the History Channel or some music museum.
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See the review down at the bottom of this page:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055026/
The mix of ?trad? (traditional ((Dixieland)) jazz) music with the newer pop songs is quite interesting. This is post-1950s rock and roll, and pre-Beatles. Very interesting. These pop songs represent a very short period in popular music history. The way the British bands are mixing them with ?50s rock and roll and 1920s New Orleans and Memphis Jazz is quite interesting.
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I?ve never heard of this film before, but I find it interesting. Much of the Jazz music being played is a copy of the Pete Fountain New Orleans jazz band style of the 1960s. His style was modeled after the old-time Jazz players from early in the 20th Century. Some of these old guys still played in Jazz bands at Preservation Hall well into the 1960s. Part of one of the bands can be seen in ?The Cincinnati Kid?. The lady at the piano in that film was known as ?Sweet Emma the Bell Gal? (she had bells strapped to her knees). By the late ?70s all the old-timers were gone, and Pete Fountain carried on their tradition, although a lot of Jazz critics said that Fountain?s band sounded too ?mechanical?, which was a common complaint about white Jazz bands that tried to imitate the old original Black Jazz bands.
Some of the other types of modern music in this film is quite similar to a new era of American ?rock? music which came out during what some of us used to call ?The Kennedy Era?, when JFK was President. I think we called it that because it started around 1960 and ended around ?63-?64. Then the Beatles took the world by storm in ?64 and all of a sudden American teens began to listen to the British versions of this new ?rock? music.
The joke about the British police trying to stop the big ?Jazz Show? is similar to the stories about how some city governments tried to stop ?rock festivals? and shows in the late ?50s and early ?60s in the US.
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I saw it when it was first released in theaters and I saw it a few years ago. I liked it. It's not a big-budget film, but the plot is interesting. I think it takes place in a remote area of Scottland. A strange guy from outer space lands in the moors in a round space ship. Kinda spooky.
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Paint Your Wagon should have used ?Takin? a Break?.
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Lol, yes I saw that on Saturday Night Live years ago. Maybe TCM should run that segment as a short after airing It's a Wonderful Life. Lol. Very satisfying.
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Are you talking about the intro that TCM sometimes uses with the guys in the band sitting on large wooden boxes, and they are playing as the stage hands move the boxes into place?
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I agree with Iz on this. Potter was ultimately unsuccessful since Bailey lived and triumphed in the end. Anyway, Potter ?found? the money rather than stealing it outright. Although I would like to see a bunch of people in town beat the heck out of Potter, or maybe see him go to jail, but there is not a good place to put such a sequence in the film and it might distract from all the success of Bailey in the end.
There were a few exceptions to the code such as ?Frankly my dear, I don?t give a damn? in Gone With the Wind. Also, in ?Watch on the Rhine? in 1943, Paul Lukas takes a guy out in the garden of a wealthy person?s house in Washington and shoots him, and he gets away with it. The guy he shot was going to inform on him to the Nazis, but Lukas still did not have the legal right to kill the guy in DC in 1943. However, since we were at war with the Nazis at that time, the code people let that one slip by.
On the other hand, notice in the opening scene every week in TV?s Gunsmoke, Marshal Dillon met a bag guy in the street and he always let the bad guy draw first. Then Dillon drew and killed the guy. This was the TV code rules, since it would make Dillon always defending himself. The TV code rules were quite similar to the movie code rules. You might notice in many Western movies they make a big deal about who draws first. If whoever draws first succeeds in killing someone, then that?s murder and it?s illegal, but if the guy who draws second kills the bad guy, then that?s self defense and it?s legal. That?s why they made such a big deal out of being able to ?fast draw? in the old cowboy movies. Whereas in real life, many bad guys were shot in the back or ambushed by law enforcement like in the Bonnie and Clyde case. I think the FBI allowed Dillinger to ?go for his gun? before they shot him outside the theater.
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Operator 13 is a very good but rare Cooper film. I taped it off TCM years ago. It's actually a Marion Davies film with Cooper in it. She plays a Civil War spy for the North. He plays a Southern military soldier. It's a clever film and a pretty good spy film.
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My family group are three old people now. We can buy anything we want (except expensive cars) and we are very particular about what we like. So we came to an agreement a few years ago to give each other packages of fancy food for Christmas, especially decorative multi-packs with different surprises in them. Fancy cheese, imported candy, unusual stuff, things that we like but we don?t usually buy for ourselves, things like expensive imported olives. Then we all share this stuff well into the year. Then, after Christmas, we all go down and shop at the sales and buy for ourselves stuff we personally want. Lol, it?s fun.
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Muni was great in Juarez. He looked just like Juarez.
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> I want to say it one more time before I can no
> longer...
>
> MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!
>
> I have restricted access as well, so I'll keep mine
> short...
Dang! Are you on death row in the Big House?
Can we call the governor for you?
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Thanks for the info.
I found this link to more interesting trivia.
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> Fred...is the TCM ad similar to a 1950's commercial?
> If 1950's style is again popular...
Yes, there were some like this in the '40s, '50s, and early '60s. Usually kids waking up in the middle of the night and seeing Santa flying through the sky, or waking up on Christmas morning and seeing all the presents under the tree. Lots of happy smiling faces. Lol, the kids first introduction to consumerism. A great annual American celebration. The theaters would run these and then run a bunch of commercials for local stores.
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Ok, I've just seen the scene in question. It starts with a wide shot of Stewart and dollies in to a close up. Then after a few seconds it creeps in for a closer close up. It must be this creep-in that they are talking about being printed optically.
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Personally, I don't know. I wonder if it's because the film runs so long before the exciting stuff starts to happen?
I might have never watched it, except that I eventually saw part of the angel story while channel surfing. So I decided to watch the whole thing so I would know what led up to that great ending.
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Oh, there might have been another way they could have zoomed in on the film. See this low-budget optical printer.
http://www.jkcamera.com/optical_printer.htm
The camera is on the left, and the projector part is on the right.
Note that the camera bed has two hand crank things at the very rear of it. This can be used to zoom in on the projected frame by moving the camera forward. It can be done all at one time on this machine, but on the older machines it might have required a slight camera movement and a lens re-focus after each frame was shot.
In other words, set and focus the camera part, shoot one frame, then move the camera a little closer, set and focus again and shoot the next frame, then move the camera closer, set and focus again and shoot the next frame. This would produce a ?zoom? effect as the camera gradually zooms in on the projected movie frames.
When the final film is finally projected, the zoom would not appear to have been shot one frame at a time, and it would look like a zoom-in as if the original studio camera had used a zoom lens, except that the grain quality of the film would be enlarged and the quality would suffer as the optical-printer camera moves in, since the camera is enlarging the original movie film.
I think that's what the article is talking about: "To remedy the situation, during postproduction the director and his editor manually and painstakingly moved in ? frame by frame. It created what appears to be an optical zoom."
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I've been trying to think of the earliest movies in which I've seen a zoom shot.
I saw one on TCM a few months ago that was made in 1940. It was about a family running a remote motel in Arizona and they had some trouble with some bank robbers hiding out there. The film started with zoom in on the bus on the road, then it zoomed back to a wide shot, then it panned left and zoomed in on the motel. I just about fell out of my chair seeing a zoom shot in an old movie like that.
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There were basically two types of printers back in those days: 1) contact printer, 2) optical printer.
In a contact printer, the emulsion of the exposed and developed film came in contact with the unexposed raw film stock being printed to.
With an optical printer, a small high-quality lens was located in-between the developed film and the raw film stock being printed to.
I don?t know when an optical zoom lens was invented for optical printers, but the old printers had a way to enlarge the picture. They might have had a series of lenses of different focal length, or separate magnifying lenses, to get various degrees of enlargement. They would basically photograph a tiny portion of the original 35 mm film that had already been developed. If this is the case and they wanted to make an optical printer ?zoom?, then they would print one frame at a time, change to a longer focal length lens (or a stronger magnifying lens), and then print another frame. If they had enough lenses, they could carry this out one frame at a time for a second or two, and when shown on a projector, it would look like a zoom in.
I don?t remember the exact scene, but I?ll watch for it tonight on NBC (starting 8 pm Eastern), 7 Central and Mountain.
The scene could be a straight cut from the original wide-angle to and optical close-up. We can tell if the film gets grainy during the close up, because an optical close-up basically enlarges a small portion of the original film. We can also tell if it is a ?zoom?, either with a zoom lens in the optical printer or printed frame by frame by using different magnifying lenses in the printer and advancing the developed film one frame at a time.
When they ?remove frames? from a film, by means of an optical printer, that speeds up the projected action. This is sometimes used when someone hits some, such as in one scene when Orson Welles hits a guy in the fight scene in the park in ?The Lady from Shanghai?.
With an optical printer, they can print each frame twice or more, and that slows down the action when projected. This is used in the scene where Cary Grant realizes Shirley Temple is in his apartment, and her sister and a lawyer are banging on his door. He does a ?take? with a surprised look on his face, and that ?take? is slowed down (to make it last longer on the screen) by means of optically printing each frame 2 or 3 times.
Since some old silent films are damaged, they will sometimes make an optical print of the titles and freeze-frame one of the title frames. They will use the cleanest and best of the title frames. Sometimes you can see the dust spots frozen since they are duplicating that one frame for a few seconds.
Another way to extend a short scene in length is to run it forward in an optical printer, then backward, then forward again while the raw film stock keeps rolling forward. On the screen you will see the actor appearing to move (lets say, to the) left, then right, then left again, and an expert can tell that his two moves to the left are exactly the same, made from the same short piece of film, and his move to the right is a reverse motion of his move to the left.
Let?s study that scene of Jimmy Stewart tonight and see if we can tell how the close-up was made.
Fred
Oh, after reading your interesting article, I found this:
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Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
Welcome to the group.
It's a Wonderful Life - Production notes
in General Discussions
Posted
> I was waiting for Fred to answer, but this got
> "buried" in newer stuff. That wasn't a zoom (as
> such), which is done with the camera in place and the
> lens elements adjusted to (apparently) "move" closer
> or further. It's called a "tracking shot" (or maybe
> a crane shot), since the camera itself moves toward
> or away from the subject.
I don't remember the last scene in "Young and Innocent". But you are right about tracking shots. That's when the camer is on a dolly (a small four-wheel truck or platform). The dolly is pushed toward or away from a subject. A zoom lens shot can imitate a trucking shot, somewhat, but the perspective changes. I think with a dolly shot, objects at different distances from the camera appear to get further apart. With a zoom lens shot, they can seem to move closer together. Of course some dollys are big, they can even be a big truck that is heavy enough to carry a boom or a crane on the back flatbed, so that the shot can "truck" (move forward or backward) and the camera can raise up and down, as in the opening shot of "Touch of Evil", the scene where the bomb is planted and later blows up the car as the car drives into Mexico. That was done with a big dolly (possibly a big truck) with a crane arm on it, with the camera operator probably sitting next to the camera and aiming it all during that complex motion.
The zoom in on the close up of Stewart in Wonderful Life, in the bar prayer scene, started out as a dolly shot from wide to medium close. Then the zoom in closer to his face was apparently done one frame at a time in an optical printer, by moving the printer's camera a little closer to the each film frame and by refocusing the lens.