I love stories like this: behind-the-scenes film footage of Marilyn Monroe playing with Tony Curtis on the San Diego beach location for Some Like It Hot has surfaced… in Australia, of all places. It’s a two-and-a-half-minute reel of 8mm that was shot in 1959 by a sailor Marilyn had met and invited to the set; the reel, still in its original Kodak box, was passed on to the sailor’s daughter after his death, and she’s now putting it up for auction, ostensibly because she thinks it “might be of some significance to the film world.” (Um, yeah, and the fact that similar amateur footage of Marilyn on the set of The Misfits was auctioned for $60K earlier this year had no bearing on this magnanimous gesture? Sure…)

Regardless of the motivation behind the auction, I hope the footage is made available to the public after the sale. I’m not a huge Marilyn fan — I’ve never bought into that particular cult of celebrity, for some reason — but I do enjoy glimpses of the stars “off-stage,” as it were, especially from the days before behind-the-scenes material was commonplace. Also, Some Like It Hot is one of my favorite films, and this footage is reportedly in color, which will be interesting to see as the movie itself is black and white.

It just amazes me that treasures like this are lurking out there in people’s attics and closets…

[Incidentally, the photo up there at the top has nothing to do with this story, aside from it being a picture of Marilyn Monroe, but it’s one I’ve been meaning to post up for a while. It amuses me to see that even an icon of the stature of Humphrey freaking Bogart was still just a guy, and got caught doing exactly what any other guy would do if they found themselves sitting next to Marilyn Monroe…]

As with so many other things that were much, much cooler twenty or thirty years ago, movie posters these days are pretty uninspired. It used to be that even the lowest-budget drive-in fodder was advertised with beautiful, colorful painted-art collages. That was before Photoshop and rock-bottom-line thinking took hold in the industry, though. These days, the dominant aesthetic — if you could call it that — is all about headshots of the cast. Here’s a video introduction to the master of that particular craft:

Oh, yes, another classic collectible is born. I think I’ll stick with the vintage stuff, thanks.

Via.

Just for fun, here’s the prologue from Escape from New York, which explains the premise behind the film:

As I said in the previous entry, this was pretty mind-bending stuff when I was a wee lad. It still raises the hair on my arms, to be honest. It’s perfectly executed, with its combination of groovy early-80s synth music, imitation computer graphics (hand-drawn animation, I believe), and the perfect female voiceover artist… not to mention the tongue-in-cheek irony of “Liberty Island Security Control.” It’s a bloody shame Hollywood has forgotten how to make solidly entertaining B-grade fare like this, which was well aware of its basic silliness but still managed to somehow be thought-provoking and cool, unlike most of the A-level spectaculars we get nowadays.

But then I’m well on my way to grumpy-old-manhood, and I suppose this is just another case of getting uptight at the damn kids playing on my lawn…

Ever since I stumbled across that trailer Thursday, I’ve had the movie Heavy Metal on the brain. Not an entirely unpleasant situation, but definitely a little outside my usual obsessions…

Anyway, I tried talking about it to a few of my friends at work and found, much to my surprise, that this movie doesn’t seem to be very well remembered. I didn’t expect the kids in the office to know about it, but even the older guys could only scratch their heads and say they think they saw it and they kind of remember it, but not really. And here I’ve believed all these years that it was a minor touchstone for my generation, not on the level of Star Wars or even Tron, but at least equivalent to Caddyshack. Once again, however, I seem to find myself the Lone Keeper of Obsolete Pop Culture.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised in the case of Heavy Metal. It’s not exactly a great classic, even by “cult classic” standards.

Continue Reading…

Today is Pioneer Day, a Utah state holiday commemorating the arrival of the first Mormon settlers here in the Salt Lake Valley. If you’re from around here, you know what it’s all about, but for my out-of-state readers I should explain that this day is basically an end-of-the-month do-over of the Fourth of July: we have a big parade in the morning, then picnics in the park, carnivals, day-long activities for the kids, and finally, fireworks at night. (There are some who grumble, in fact, that Utahns make a bigger deal of our local founder’s day than our nation’s Independence Day and that this indicates there’s some lingering whiff of treason in Mormon culture. Personally, I think folks just like fireworks and parades.) Anyway, most of the state’s population seems to have the day off… but not me. Nope, I work for The Man. Which means I’m sitting at my workstation, same as always, trying not to listen to the drums of the marching band a mere half-block away…

You know, on these hot summer days when responsibilities keep me inside drudging away at my desk instead of out playing as I’d like to be, my mind tends to wander back to my carefree adolescent years, when all I really had to think about was the anticipation of getting my driver’s license and the beguiling, inscrutable mystery of girls. Oh, and of nonsense like this:

That’s actually a trailer for the late-90s home-video release of Heavy Metal, not the original theatrical version from 1981, but as I recall the vintage advertising wasn’t too different. You have no idea how exciting this movie looked to me when I was twelve. An R-rated cartoon? With aliens and starships and rock music and the possibility of… boobies?! It was utterly mind-blowing… and of course, there was no way my mom was going to let me see it, not with that R rating and those danged cartoon boobies. The innuendo in Moonraker had been bad enough. And so it was a long, long time before I would see Heavy Metal in its entirety (I think I was in my twenties before I finally caught it at a midnight screening), and naturally, after all those years of build-up, it turned out to be something of a disappointing mess. Ah, but the images and the music… man, that stuff lives on in my memory as a touchstone of all that was simultaneously cool and tacky about the early ’80s.
Yeah… summer days in 1981…

From somewhere outside my office, I can hear that the parade carries on…

It’s another of those crazy-making weeks that offers little chance to blog (and naturally, these are the weeks when I seem to have the most I want to blog about — this is an immensely frustrating situation, believe me), so to keep you entertained until I manage to actually, you know, write something, allow me to direct your attention to Jaime J. Weinman’s rationalization of how he can call Moonraker the dumbest James Bond movie ever (even over Die Another Day!) and yet still feel a certain affection for it:

…it’s just so very good-natured and unpretentious in its desire to do anything to entertain; it wants you to like it so badly and will do anything to be liked, whether it’s repeating the plot of a movie made two years earlier or turning a psychotic killer into a kid-friendly romantic comedy lead. I can’t help but be a little charmed by a movie that’s so anxious to be loved; today, when a blockbuster movie is bad, it’s just loud and obnoxious, demanding our attention rather than giving us beautiful things to look at. Moonraker is like [director] Lewis Gilbert’s home movies reel of cool stuff [production designer] Ken Adam built; that’s enough to keep it out of Die Another Day purgatory.

For the record, I, too, harbor some warm feelings for Moonraker. It was the first Bond movie I ever saw; my mother took me and a half-dozen of my friends to see it for my tenth birthday. She was mortified by all the innuendo in the dialogue, certain that she would be getting some nasty phone calls from other mothers once my buddies started repeating things we’d heard, but we didn’t care about all that mushy stuff — in those days of the post-Star Wars space-movie craze, we were only there for the shuttles and lasers.

You might also want to check out I Expect You to Die!, an entertaining blog whose proprietor is reviewing one Bond flick a week until the release of the next one, Quantum of Solace, this fall. He’s also doing additional commentary on certain related issues, such as the amusing (and dead-on) observation that the Bond-o-verse invariably presents Americans as bumbling yokels, and yet American audiences love the series anyhow.

I hope to be back later today with some thoughts on last weekend’s concert experience…

A number of movie blogs are reporting that Quentin Tarantino’s long-gestating World War II project Inglorious Bastards might be finally sputtering to life. My sharp-eyed loyal readers are aware, of course, that I don’t much care for Tarantino films, but I find I’m looking forward to this one, for no other reason than to hear the fulminating reactions of the local prude brigades when the word “bastards” goes up on theater marquees all over the valley…

In the words of the immortal Bugs Bunny, “ain’t I a stinker?”

So, I was just out to my mom’s place and happened to catch a few minutes of EntertainmentInsideHollywoodAccessTonight, and what I heard during those few minutes utterly blew my mind: today is Kevin Bacon’s fiftieth birthday.

Let me repeat that: Kevin Bacon — one of my favorite actors, the star of one of my favorite movies (Footloose), the guy who brought to life the quintessential 1980s “rebel with a cause” (Ren McCormack, one of my many heroes during my high school years), the guy who everyone else is only six degrees away from — has just hit the half-century mark.

And if that isn’t alarming enough, they also said that there’s a big-screen remake of Footloose in the works starring the tween sensation du jour, Zac Efron.

I’m going to go lie down with a cool cloth on my head now. God, I feel old…