The Original "Cliffhanger" Is 100 Years Old

My favorite NYC history blog, The Bowery Boys, had a great story this weekend on the 100th anniversary of the "cliffhanger". The term comes from the famous silent films series THE PERILS OF PAULINE, the first of which debuted 100 years ago this month. 

Even more fascinating is that the cliffs that Pauline hung off, which is where the term comes from, are the Palisades in NJ (pictured here). New Jersey and New York City is where the film industry began and thrived for a couple decades before migrating towards better weather (and cheaper real estate for growing studios) to the West Coast.

Also somewhat notable is exactly where Pauline's adventures took place. Before Gov. Christie made it famous for a traffic jam, Ft. Lee was the site of filming for the first of these serialized adventures in which a young girl with an inheritance is lured towards danger by a man seeking her money. Below is the original film in this series, available on YouTube.  

A Cinematic Clip Tour Of Dirty Old New York

Over at The EV Grieve, they've posted the fifth in a series of cinematic clip tours of New York from back in its less glamorous period. These were created by cinephile Jonathan Hertzberg, who is obsessed with the dirty old NYC of the late 60s, 1970s and 1980s. His latest 25 minute tour de grit is put together with a number of notable films (TAKING OF PELHAM 123, SUPERMAN, TAXI DRIVER) and some lesser known films, some of which even I couldn't guess (what is Barbra Streisand doing with a bunch of thugs cruising down the East River?!).

Some of the clips are classics, others curiosities, but the real interest is often the background or the location itself. There's one remarkable shot of 1970s Times Square that shows not only the old HoJo's (one of my favorite spots) but also a still-operating Horn & Hardart automat. And there is a great sequence of shots around the 8:00 minute mark of Jessica Lange and King Kong at the old World Trade Center, ending with Kong dead on the wide beach that used to abut the site made from the excavation of the twin towers and later developed into Battery Park City and the World Financial Center.

Make sure you stay 'til the end for an Oscar-like tribute to actors associated with NYC who are no longer with us.
Dirty Old New York aka Fun City, Part V from Jonathan Hertzberg on Vimeo.

New Doc Delves Into Mystery of Photographer Vivian Maier

Since first hearing about her in 2010, I've been fascinated with the mystery of now legendary urban photographer Vivan Maier. She was a mid-century professional nanny, living in NYC and then Chicago, who took nearly 100,000 photos that were all stashed away in a storage locker and never seen by anyone. The locker was auctioned off in 2007 and the man who bought it, John Maloof, started posting the pictures online (the one here is from her New York days), showing the world a remarkable body of work that drew comparisons to contemporary artists like Evans, Arbus, Weegee and even Cindy Sherman. 

Now Maloof, along with producer Charlie Siskel (Gene's nephew!), has made a documentary which looks at the curious story of the woman behind these remarkable photos. The movie, profiled in yesterday's TIMES, comes out this Friday that IFC Center and I can't wait to see it. The trailer is great, hinting at the revelations about her extremely private life from the children she cared for. 

RuPaul and John Waters Crack Wise and Talk Show Biz

When RuPaul is not busy encouraging and judging America's up and coming drag queens, he can be found driving celebrities around L.A. in his car and chatting with him.  "RuPaul Drives" is the latest in the mobile celebrity talkshow format that started with Jerry Seinfeld's web series. What makes this new show special is her guest, filmmaker John Waters. Waters consistently cracks Ru up and literally leaves her laughing with a NY POST headline that's a personal favorite of his. 

The best part of this though was a story which I had never heard before, about how John Waters got interested in "the biz". The answer? Howdy Doody. As an impressionable 10-year-old, he got to sit in the Peanut Gallery at a taping of the classic kids show at Rockefeller Center in the 1950s. He was fascinated by how fake the whole thing was and got instantly hooked on show biz. Who would have guess Howdy Doody inspired the genius behind PINK FLAMINGOES and FEMALE TROUBLE?

A New Roller Coaster For Coney On A Famous Film Site

Construction began this week on a brand new $10M roller coaster on the boardwalk in Coney Island. The Thunderbolt is the name of this all steel ride part of the new Luna Park which features inversions, loops and twists making it the first coaster to flip patrons at the seaside park since 1910. Built by the famed Italian firm Zamperla, the ride will rise 115 feet and then plunge cars at speeds of 80mph through the twists and turns of this new thriller.  

What's notable about the ride, though, is also its location. It's on the site of a kinder, gentler wooden coaster that was also called the Thunderbolt. That ride dated from Coney's early midcentury heyday and was shutdown in the 1970s but remained standing until Mayor Giuliani illegally knocked it down in the middle of the night. That Thunderbolt was famously featured in Woody Allen's classic ANNIE HALL as the childhood home of Alvy Singer, who family fictionally lived in the odd house that jammed under the corner of the ride. 

I was always fascinated by that house on my trips to Coney when I first arrived in NYC. The TIMES article says it was destroyed by fire but just the interior--from the outside it did look like a house someone could live in. Surely, once the ride shut down for the evening, you could get some shuteye but I imagine hanging out there during the day would have been close to the famous scene in Allen's film.  

Randy Rainbow Does John Travolta In New Video

The amazing Randy Rainbow has joined the pile-on re; John Travolta's infamous gaffe during Sunday's Oscars, but with inspried results. He has taken Idinia Menzel's nom de Oscar "Adele Dazeem" and smartly matched it to the song "La Vie Boheme" from RENT (in which she famously got her start) to create a musical mishmash of mispronounced celebrity names. It's like a musical version of the SLATE Travoltifier that went super-viral on Monday, giving that news site its most viewed story ever (nearly 4 million hits). Randy is one of my favorite online comedians and with this one, including a hilariously slowed down version of Travolta's clip, he has knocked it out of the park.

The Oscar Pizza Guy Gets His Tip

The biggest question post-Oscar, besides what Matthew McConaughey or John Travolta were thinking, was what happened to all that money Ellen collected for the pizza guy? 

Well, after a flurry of social media concern, the answer came yesterday during Ellen's post-Oscar show. The lucky guy Edgar Martirosyan sat down for a chat and Ellen presented him, not just with the $600 she collected from folks like Brad Pitt and Harvey Weinstein but also an additional $400 she threw in herself for a cool 1K. In addition to that, Ellen ordered countless boxes of pizza for her audience, which was surely another boon to his family-owned Big Mama's and Papa Pizza in Hollywood. 

I was curious about the outcome of this and couldn't find much on the interwebs. But leave it to MTV News who knows there audience (pizza!!!) to report the story. The interview with Martirosyan is pretty cute too as he reveals that Julia Roberts was his biggest movie crush and he got to hand her a slice. Some people were critical of the pizza bit taking up too much time on a ceremony that is always overlong, but I thought it was fun and (as Ellen mentions) quite practical as all those actresses were hungry, having starved themselves for weeks to fit into their dresses. 

SCANDAL and FELICITY Star Scott Foley Is Kinda Cute

Scott Foley is getting a TV second coming lately, with his role on SCANDAL. But I will always think of him at Noel from FELICITY, one side of the pained love triangle that was at the center of that show's existence. I was sorta hooked on this show for the first season or so. I know--it was a little cheesy, a little ridiculous, but it was J.J. Abrams pre-LOST and had its charms to say the least. At the end of the show's 4 year run, FELICITY chose Ben (sorta) but now it looks like she chose wrong. 

In a new spread for some towel company called Charisma (!) that was featured on Logo's blog, Foley shows he is quite an equal match to the hunky Ben (played by Scott Speedman). So I would say that qualifies Noel not just for the Hi-Fi Bri Kinda Cute hall of fame, but sorta elevates him to "Kinda Hot" as well. Just make sure you watch the somewhat cheesy video too of a behind the scenes look at his shoot. It's a borderline SNL-skit about how much Scott likes fancy towels and how he never feels sexy, except when his wife tells him. Oh yeah, he has a wife. Well as Billy Wilder once wrote, "Nobody's perfect." :)

The YANK! Cast Recording Is Now Available And It's A Classic

Last night, I went to the York Theater to celebrate the official release of the cast album for YANK!, a musical about gay soldiers in WWII written by my colleagues David and Joe Zellnik. (You can download it today via iTunes for just 10 clams!) From when I first heard about the idea for this show, I've been a big fan and I've seen it more than a few times, in it's many incarnations, from a reading in a rehearsal studio on 42nd Street to a beautiful production at the Gallery Players in Brooklyn.
But these did not prepare me for how amazing this recording is.

With rich orchestrations by Bway vet Jonathan Tunick and a jazzy Big Band sound, listening to these songs is now somewhat like discovering the old '40s era journal that kicks off the show's opening scene; these songs sound like a time capsule from a long lost past that is familiar yet strikingly different too. If you like your musical theatre old school, this show is like something from the 1940s except for the fact that it's memorable songs, especially the aching "Reme'bring You", are about two men who fall in love during WWII.

I was a supporter of the Kickstarter campaign that made this beautiful CD possible. Now that its available to the public, David and Joe are hoping that as this music gets out into the world, more productions of the show will happen and eventually the show will end up where it deserves to be--on Broadway. Hey...if the gays can play for the NBA, anything is possible!  :)

Today's The 50th Anniversary Of The Beatles First U.S. Concert At Washington Coliseum

While The Beatles' NYC appearance on THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW gets most of the attention for their American debut, the Fab Four's first live concert for a paying audience took place in Washington DC. Two days after being seen by nearly 75 million Americans, the group played for 8,000 screaming fans at the Washington Coliseum a few blocks from Union Station, where they arrived by train in a snowstorm.

Today's Washington Post has a fantastic oral history of that first Beatles show, with attendees like Al Gore (who grew up in DC) and Albert Maysles (who shot the concert) and Sir Paul reminiscing about it all. There are some great details, like the chat Ringo had with a child on the train and the teen screaming which had police officers putting bullets in their ears. You can also watch footage from that show on iTunes new Beatles channel, along with two of The Beatles SULLIVAN segments.  I watched these uncut broadcast segments after the CBS tribute on Sunday kept showing tantalizingly short clips. They are really remarkable...the screaming is annoying but also electric, especially during "I Wanna Hold Your Hand". At one point, Ed himself cannot quiet the audience down to speak in intro'ing the second segment.

Finally, a live celebration of the anniversary is happening tonight at the old Coliseum itself (which now goes by its original name U Line Arena). It's been brought back to life for a one night only restaging of that first show with a Beatles tribute band. They will play the exact same set list and the show will start, as it did then, at exactly 8:31pm.  And just like the original, it is also sold out.