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Exactly, this is what took Daria and me to Prague, as I wrote in the first post. One of the questions we wanted (and to an extant, managed) to figure out was what typically changes when an American comedy is released in Czechoslovakia, Soviet Russia, or France. Normally, these films were re-cut for...

For commercially released DVD transfers, would it not be possible to find a sequence with lots of movement, and go through the video frames step by step, while counting the actual/original film frames equivalent as evidenced by the motion? If this is done for a few seconds of video, maybe a reasona...

Snuck over to Nutrateville for a peek today, boy, is it dull over there, not even anything worth correcting or commenting on in weeks, but it was fun to see the "all collectors and/or archives are greedy hoarders and we have the right to see anything anyone owns whether they like it or not"...

Anyone who comes around here saying the speeds on the CHAPLIN AT KEYSTONE set look right to them is going to get an arguement whether they like it or not. 16 to 18 fps is too damn slow for the Keystones or nearly ANY silent comedy. The "subleties" one thinks they are missing at a faster fr...

Here's a packed episode of the game show I'VE GOT A SECRET, not only do you have Buster Keaton, but you have the only known television appearance of one of the inventors of television, Philo T. Farnsworth, and you get to see Garry Moore do his rather good Keaton impersonation as well. From 1957: htt...

Part Two: Moving right along, after lunch, we saw another installment in the Victor McLaglen/Edmund Lowe Guy Adventures, UNDER PRESSURE, which I posted my program notes for so I won’t go into it further here, except that the Audience seemed to enjoy it, ditto for THE SEA BEAST, which is no classic, ...

Hi, this is Yuri Tsivian of U of Chicago. Daria Khitrova and me spent 2 days at NFA in Prague measuring shot lengths for Czech release version of Keystone films. All Czech titles but one presented no problems identifying. The only one we are still working on is a Fatty film whose Czech title is &qu...

I would quibble with you a bit over Flynn's appearance. He's not a wreck, mind you, but he always looks tired to me in this period. And it's in his eyes. Follow Flynn in each decade and his eyes reveal what his mindset is. Throughout the Thirties his eyes sparkle with a rougish glint of a cat who h...

Saturday Morning, after the Annual Cartoon Show (I never get up that early), was a rare showing of the 1954 Errol Flynn swashbuckler CROSSED SWORDS, which Flynn produced and shot in Italy and has been in a rights-issue morass for decades, and seldom seen. When seen, it is usually in beet-red Pathec...

It was the coldest and wettest Memorial Day Weekend I’ve ever experienced in Columbus, rainy and averaging 42-45 degrees in the morning, and grey and drizzly much of the time. Not that much of this matters when your busy in the basement banquet rooms of the Ramada Midwest Conference Hotel, but as on...