Category: Film

This was the first VHS cover of Love Letter to Edie The film’s first release in 1975 was on 16mm film, when it only played in movie theaters and film festivals. Around 1985, VHS cassettes were in wide enough usage that small films like Love Letter could be distributed to individual collectors.  They were duplicated…

                  It’s Easter, when eggs become an important subject across the country, and references to Edith Massey abound. Even a noted conservative pundit who regularly writes for such un-Edith right-wing publications like The American Conservative, The National Review, Weekly Standard, The Dallas Morning News, The Wall Street…

The day I saw “Searching for Sugar Man,” I received my first-ever royalty check from MGM/United Artists for a union film I worked on back in the 80s.  “Sugarman” won the 2012 Academy Award for best documentary.  The movie is a mind-bending story from the 1970s that  goes against the grain of typical show business success…

Stumbled across this video today on one of my favorite websites.  I was on these shoots on a cold, windy December day in Alphabet City in 1981.  The shots look like 3rd generation copies of the 16mm workprint. No sound, because most of the sound was lost during the 15 year post-production odyssey when the…

German filmmaker Werner Herzog is my favorite filmmaker of all time.  Thanks to Netflix, you can watch many of the dozens of films he has made since the 1970s.  Usually his works are character studies of real humans on the edge, and they are on edges that most people never knew existed in this world. …

I saw Prometheus recently in a large theater, something I rarely do anymore.  It is such a crock, alternating between ridiculous to silly to patently unbelievable. First, this lame effort didn’t seem like it could be a Ridley Scott film.  He is now at least 75 years old, and has about 12 films in “pre-production.” …

“In Darkness” was a Polish film nominated for an Oscar in 2011, but strangely rates only a 7.7 on IMdB.  It is the true story of a group of Jews hiding from Nazis in the decrepit sewers of a large Polish city at the end of WWII. Many people complained because it’s (yawn) “just another”…

I lived and worked in downtown New York City in the early 1980s when the arts  were going through big changes.  Andy Warhol was rich, but at a dip in his career.  Hanging out with jet set celebrities at Studio 54 and doing their portraits based on Polaroid snapshots for $50,000, he had become a…