Will Rogers in State Fair on TCM

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Rob Farr
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Will Rogers in State Fair on TCM

Postby Rob Farr » Sun Feb 05, 2012 8:22 am

The 1933 version of State Fair will be on TCM this Weds. at 8:00pm EST. Unless you were one of the very few who caught it on the Fox Movie Channel, this has been very difficult to see outside of the 'Cons and 'Fests. It's nice to see some of the Fox classics ported over to TCM.
Rob Farr
"If it's not comedy, I fall asleep" - Harpo Marx

Richard M Roberts
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Re: Will Rogers in State Fair on TCM

Postby Richard M Roberts » Sun Feb 05, 2012 12:47 pm

Rob Farr wrote:The 1933 version of State Fair will be on TCM this Weds. at 8:00pm EST. Unless you were one of the very few who caught it on the Fox Movie Channel, this has been very difficult to see outside of the 'Cons and 'Fests. It's nice to see some of the Fox classics ported over to TCM.



Still the best version, no Rodgers and Hammerstein music, no Pat Boone, and Will Rogers and Louise Dressler are a delight. And hey, their son Norman Foster goes to the fair and gets seduced by Sally Eilers! All I ever got was cotton candy when I went to the Fair.


RICHARD M ROBERTS

Jim Reid
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Re: Will Rogers in State Fair on TCM

Postby Jim Reid » Sun Feb 05, 2012 6:22 pm

In the early 80s I was production manager at the Tulsa PBS station. We were volunteered by the station manager to tranfer all the 16mm owned by the Will Rogers Memorial. There were some silent Goldwyn features, at least one independant feature, the Roach shorts, a bunch of one-reeler travelogues and all but two or three of the Fox talkies.It took about 6 months and some of the films had to be re-assembled. They had been running for years in the auditorium at the memorial. Now they had a video projector, so they wanted them on 3/4 inch tape.
About every two weeks a guy from the memorial would show up with a van full of film cases and boxes of new tape.
I really enjoyed watching them, although quite a few of the Fox features seemed quite similar. State Fair must have been popular as it was in the worst shape.
The ones that really stood out to me were They Had to See Paris, A Connecticut Yankee and State Fair. Although they were all enjoyable.

I went back to the Memorial a few years ago. They had no film. Said it had all been donated to a film archive. I'm guessing it's in a basement somewhere. There was one 3/4 cassette with my writing on it that was on a shelf. It had about an inch of dust on it.

The guy said they were using the two box sets of DVDs that Fox put out a few years ago.

Bummer.

Rob Farr
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Re: Will Rogers in State Fair on TCM

Postby Rob Farr » Mon Feb 06, 2012 10:53 am

Jim, way back in the late 1970s or early 80s I drove through Claremont and was astonished to discover their 16mm film collection consisting of Rogers films that were totally out of reach for even the most avid buffs. They generally screened two films a day in rotation. I planned to return to Claremont for a research vacation. but that never came to pass. I can't blame them for using less labor-intensive DVDs. Even Gary Lassin, who owns a 16mm print of every Stooge short, now shows nothing but DVDs on the screens in his Stoogeum. Pop in a disc, set the DVD menu to repeat or shuffle, and Bob's Your Uncle. I just wish the Claremont folks had preserved those prints.
Rob Farr
"If it's not comedy, I fall asleep" - Harpo Marx

Jim Reid
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Re: Will Rogers in State Fair on TCM

Postby Jim Reid » Mon Feb 06, 2012 12:10 pm

I remember back when I did this, the guy at the memorial told me that the Fox features were a gift from Fox when they opened in the late 30s. Those prints must have been gorgeous at one time. I didn't know enough about film at the time to appreciate them. I still have a couple of VHS tapes I made at the time.

Richard Finegan

Re: Will Rogers in State Fair on TCM

Postby Richard Finegan » Wed Feb 08, 2012 1:34 pm

According to the 1930's AFI Catalogue STATE FAIR was edited for its 1935 reissue. Apparently the edited print is all there is. But here's hoping that TCM will surprise us with an uncut print.

The cut scene (or at least one of them) is described here:

http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/91336/St ... notes.html


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