Moving Image Archive News - A clearinghouse of information on film archiving and related endeavors

In 1969, Ken Loach made a documentary film about the operations of the charity, Save the Children, commissioned by the charity. Officials of the organization did not like what Loach presented them, at all. So much so, that they barred any public showing of the film. But now, to kick off a retrospective of the veteran British filmmaker’s work, the untitled, 53-minute film is to be pulled from the British Film Institute’s National Archive and shown, on September 1 2011, at BFI Southbank. As the BBC reports, it had been viewed by only a handful of British Film Institute archivists, and never by the London Weekend Television audiences for whom it had been intended. The explanation is quite simple: Save the Children officials did not appreciate Loach showing the work of the charity as it was: He filmed the staff at a Save the Children home in Manchester making untoward comments about the locals, and similarly, in Kenya, forbidding children to speak in their native tongues, and instead feeding them a diet of cultural baggage from earlier, British, colonial times.

Loach discusses the ban on the film, and much more, in an August 28 2011 article in The Guardian.

Herrmann with Hitchcock, his most memorable collaborator

“Herrmann’s stock in this centenary year is high, celebrated around the world in performances of rarities like his 1951 opera, Wuthering Heights, and suites of his familiar film scores. Yet scholarly work seems oddly scant,” writes Jack Sullivan, the director of American studies at Rider University.

Meanwhile, NPR’s Tom Huizenga sings Hermann’s praises.

And, more on that Bronte opera.

Orson Welles, 1937, Library of Congress

In one its This NOT Just In features, radio station KUOW, in Seattle, reported on the reaction in the town of Concrete, Washington, to the 1938 radio broadcast of War of the World, starring and directed by Orson Welles. KUOW’s Feliks Banel reported that while pockets of panic took hold in the eastern United States, the hoopla went really over the top in Concrete, 60 miles north of Seattle. For that, thank a massive storm that made the Martian landings all the more credible.

In 1927, three stars of the silent-film era, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, and Norma Talmadge became the first three film stars to have their footprints preserved in concrete in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard.

Douglas Fairbanks & Mary Pickford; Library of Congress

That memorialization occurred by accident, when the theater’s owner, Sid Grauman, asked the three stars to walk across Hollywood Boulevard from the Roosevelt Hotel to his new theater, then under construction. When they stepped onto the theater’s sidewalk, they stepped into wet cement. The actors then picked up a nail from the ground and signed their names next to those prints. Pickford dated hers.

A few months later, Grauman began the movie-star footprints tradition with his first ceremony in the forecourt, with the same three stars. The three accidentally imprinted slabs remained in place until 1958, when they were removed to make way for the Walk of Fame. They next turned up in 1981, when the widow of the building contractor who constructed the Walk of Fame wrote to city officials from Arizona, offering to sell slabs back.

How they ended up in the possession of an airplane mechanic, stored in his storage hangar east of Los Angeles, is revealed in an article from NBC Los Angeles.