Happy Birthday Boris Karloff

Today is the 123rd anniversary of the birth of horror master Boris Karloff. As I sit typing this blog, I am watching 1940's You'll Find Out on TCM. Although this movie was made as a starring vehicle for bandleader Kay Kyser, it features a trio of horror heavyweights: Karloff, Peter Lorre, and the great Bela Lugosi. The three are in cahoots in a plot to kill a young heiress played by Anna Lee (she would later costar with Karloff again in 1946's Bedlam). Although his turns as the monster are legendary, my personal favorite is 1945's The Body Snatcher, one of Boris's favorites as well. His late in life roles in The Comedy of Terrors (with Lorre,Vincent Price, and Basil Rathbone), The Raven (also with Lorre and Price, plus a young Jack Nicholson) and of course Dr. Seuss' How The Grinch Stole Christmas are unforgettable. Happy birthday, Boris.

Lois Weber

"I'll never be convinced that the general public does not want serious entertainment rather than frivolous."

Lois Weber (1882-1939) spoke those words nearly a century ago to explain why she made the films that she did. A writer, director, producer, and actress, she began her film career for Gaumont films in New Jersey in 1908 and later came to Hollywood in 1913 to work for Universal Films. Because "polite" society looked down on the movie business as immoral and fit only for second-class citizens, the fledgling industry was wide open to talented women, minorities, and immigrants.

While other studios were content to turn out one- or two-reel westerns and slapstick comedies, she was decades ahead of her time in making feature-length socially conscious films dealing with controversial subjects. This led to censorship and even outright bans of her movies in some localities. Her 1916 film Where Are My Children dealt with birth control and 1915's Hypocrites caused a sensation when it showed female nudity. She was also unafraid to tackle other sensitive subjects such as anti-semitism and abortion. But studio owner Carl Laemmle, Sr. didn't care. Because she always came in on time, under budget, and her movies made money, she enjoyed a certain cachet that allowed her to make what she wanted. Indeed, she was Universal's top director and drew a salary of $5,000 per week.

She joins Frances Marion, Mabel Normand, and Mary Pickford as female titans of early Hollywood.
Her last film was 1934's White Heat (not the James Cagney film) which she directed and co-wrote the screenplay. It was her only sound film and was one of the first films to be shown on television.

House On Haunted Hill

As another Halloween season is regrettably drawing to a close, I'd like to mention another of my favorite movies from my favorite time of year. This movie gave me the first scare I can remember from a horror flick. House On Haunted Hill was the second in a series of fright films made by Producer-Director William Castle from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. Twin opening monologues, one by Vincent Price and the other by Elisha Cook, Jr. (in a role very different from his turn in The Maltese Falcon) are excellent mood setters. Frederick Loren (Price) is a millionaire who promises five people (all of whom need the money) $10,000 each if they can survive a night of being locked inside a supposedly haunted mansion. He is married to his fourth wife, Annabelle (Carol Ohmart), a gold digger who doesn't seem to be concerned that his three previous wives all died under mysterious circumstances. As it turns out, they both try to use the house as a cover to murder the other. In the process, they nearly frighten to death one of the guests, Nora Manning (Carolyn Craig). While this film probably works better in a theater than television, it is a good fright all the same. The highlight scene for me comes early on in the film when Nora is crouching down in a darkened storage room. As she rises, she shines her candle in the face of Mrs. Slydes, the old blind wife of the caretaker. Trust me, Mrs. Slydes is a lot scarier and uglier than Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz
could ever hope to be. Mrs. Slydes is played by Leona Anderson, the sister of the real-life Broncho Billy who, as Gilbert Anderson, appears in 1903's The Great Train Robbery, one of  the first commercially produced motion pictures in history. If you've never seen this great film by Willam Castle, you are missing out. Among his other notable films are Macabre, 13 Ghosts, and The Haunting. He was loosely portrayed by John Goodman in 1993's Matinee.

Coy Watson, Sr

Coy Watson, Sr was one of filmmaking's pioneers as an actor, stuntman, animal wrangler, director, and most notably, special effects technician for several studios, the majority of the time with Mack Sennett's Keystone Studios. Born James Caughey Watson on April 14, 1890, in Belleville, Ontario, Canada, he moved with his family to Edendale, a community in northwest Los Angeles in 1895. Edendale was the first movie colony on the west coast with four studios-Norberg, Bison, Keystone, and Selig (the first permanent movie studio in
California, established in 1909)-operated there in the early part of the 20th century in kind of a Hollywood before there was a Hollywood. Its heyday lasted less than a decade, however, due to a lack of real estate for a rapidly increasing industry. By the mid-teens, all but Mack Sennett and his Keystone Studios had relocated ten miles west to Hollywood. Coy Watson got his start in the movie business in an unexpected manner. In 1911, after spending most of a day breaking a horse, he was standing on the street talking with two other cowboys when a man approached them, told them he worked for Selig Studios and asked them if they wanted to appear in a movie. The offer was $1 per day per actor and $2 for horses. Watson hired out three of his own horses and himself. In those days, actors supplied their own horses and gear and some of the early cowboy stars he worked with included Buck Jones, Hoot Gibson, and Tom Mix. Being a cowboy actor was dangerous work, as Watson would later find out. In 1913, while making Logan of the U.S.A., he was thrown from his horse and trampled. He suffered a broken arm and shoulder and was laid up for three weeks. Being a trouper, he went back in front of the camera as soon as he was able. However, he began to spend more time behind the scenes, learning the movie business and in the process, becoming one of the first prop men and special effects experts. His accomplishments included being the first to use piano wire to suspend actors and objects in mid-air and the first wrangler to work with exotic wild animals. For all of his accomplishments, he is best known for being the father of nine children, all of whom were child actors. The Watson family lived literally next door to Keystone so whenever a child was needed for a role, the studios would simply go to the Watson home and pick one out. Between Coy Sr and his children, the Watsons appeared in over a thousand movies. This led them to be dubbed "The First Family of Hollywood." Coy Watson, Sr passed away in 1968. On April 22, 1999, the Watson family received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6674 Hollywood Blvd, near the intersection of Las Palmas and Hollywood. There is an
excellent biography of Coy Watson, Jr on the market entitled "The Keystone Kid: Tales of Early Hollywood"
that makes for great reading.

The Return of the Vampire

"Your fate is to be what you are, as mine is to be what I am."
                                            -Dr. Armand Tesla (Bela Lugosi)
                                              The Return of the Vampire (1943)

The previous line is from one of my favorite horror movies of all time. I try to make sure I watch it at least once every October. Besides being entertaining, it is notable that it is one of the few films that Bela Lugosi made where he actually portrayed a vampire. This gem from Columbia also went against several of the tried and true bloodsucking legends in that the chief vampire hunter was a woman, he went after a little girl and an adult man, and he turned his human slave into a werewolf. This werewolf was unusual in that he spoke perfect english and didn't kill anyone. This movie is also unusual in that he was staked in the first part of the film and not with a wooden stake but a metal spike. As a lot of studios did during WWII, they gave a it a war background to help boost ticket sales (the story began at the end of WWI and leapt forward in time to 1941 for the second part. Stock footage of fighter planes was used as well.) and the London blitz played a pivotal part in resurrecting the vampire. As I said before, it is one my favorite horror films and is very entertaining. My heroes at TCM usually schedule it each October. Also there is a brief comic moment with two graveyard workers, one of whom is played by Billy Bevan, a contract player for Mack Sennett Studios during the 1920s. All in all its a great film and I  could think of a lot worse ways to spend an hour and a half.

Where Have All of the Theaters Gone?

Growing up in my hometown of Augusta, GA, during the 1960s and '70s, I remember there being nine movie theatres. Three downtown (one of which showed soft-core porn), two in the suburbs, and four drive-ins. The nearest drive-in is now 60 miles away in Monetta, SC, none of the three downtown functions as a movie house now, and the two in the suburbs are gone. All nine went under. In their places we now have three, all of them in the suburbs. Two of them are first run houses and the other a subsequent run house. Granted, the two first-runs have multiple screens and only one from my childhood had more than one screen and then just two. In addition, four other theaters have opened and closed in my lifetime. That gives Augusta a loss of thirteen theaters over the last 40-odd years. Quite a difference from the golden age of Hollywood. In 1941 there were approximately 17000 theaters in America in 8500 cities with 10.5 million seats. There were 49 cities with a population of  200,000 and up and they contained 20% of all theaters, one-third of all seats, and generated two-thirds of all ticket sales. Today there are less than 6000 theaters remaining. The factors of general television, the supreme court decision forcing the studios to divest themselves of their theater chains (at one time Paramount Studios alone owned over 1200 theatres) and the resulting reduction in new movies being made, home video (videotape and DVDs), pay television and new technology allowing us to watch movies on our computers have all done their part in this. Will we see a further reduction? I don't think so. I think the market has shaken itself out enough to where we are at a static situation. Simply put, we will see very few new theaters but also very few going out of business. People still need date nights and cheap entertainment and for the movie geeks there is no substitute for the theater experience.

FIRST POST

This is the very first post to this blog. I am using it to mainly play around and edit things to look the way I want them to.