Bela Lugosi was often depressed performing the role of Dracula. He dreamt he was dead, and woke in the morning exhausted, he tells Dorothy West in this episode of Intimate Interviews from 1932.

Lugosi explains how after the First World War, he participated in the Hungarian revolution, but soon found himself on the wrong side. He therefore left the country and arrived in America, where he continued his career as an actor.

His first success was in the title role of the stage production of Dracula. This led him to starring in the classic film version, directed by Todd Browning in 1931. Thereafter, he made a series of Horror films for Universal Studios, most notably starring against that “King of Horror”, Boris Karloff.

Lugosi jokes with West telling her is learning slang and knows how to say “okay”, “baloney” and “the cat’s whiskers”. He also goes onto say he likes living in America as people know how to mind their own business - which is more a reference to the way sections of Hollywood society ostracized the actor. Lugosi ends the interview pretending to be one of the Undead.
 

 
Bonus clip, Lugosi interviewed leaving the sanitarium in 1955, after the jump…
 

 
The first in a series of teaser trailers for Dean & Josh Cavanagh’s Kubricks has been released. They feature the character of “Donald the Director” (played by Roger Evans), who suffers a mental breakdown during the making of a film, and begins to involve his cast (Joanna Pickering, Gavin Bain) and crew in his sinister and obsessive fantasies.

Produced by Alan McGee, Kubricks looks a cross between Ballard, Kubrick and Kenneth Anger, which suggests it may be brilliant, or indulgent, or like some of the best art, a bit of both. We wait to see. Meantime, check the Kubricks website for more details.
 

‘Kubricks’ teaser (((RABBIT)))
 
Bonus teasers for ‘Kubricks’, after the jump…
 

 
Never been released on DVD, Tougher Than Leather (1988) directed by Rick Rubin and starring Rubin, Run DMC and The Beastie Boys is a weird blend of blaxploitation, tongue-in-cheek farce and home movie. I like its don’t-give-a-fuck sloppiness - kind of like Scorsese on a glue-sniffing bender. Plus, it manages to insult virtually every race, creed and gender on the planet.

With Slick Rick, Russell Simmons and Richard Edson.
 

 
Filmmaker and musician, Don Letts was working as a DJ at the Roxy club in London in 1977 when he filmed most of the punk bands that appeared there with his Super 8 camera. Letts captured a glorious moment of musical history and its ensuing social, political and cultural revolution.

Letts decided he was going to make a film with his footage, and had sold his belongings to ensure he had enough film stock to record the bands that appeared night-after-night over a 3 month period. Eventually, he collated all of the footage into The Punk Rock Movie, which contained performances by the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Wayne County & the Electric Chairs, Generation X, Slaughter and the Dogs, The Slits, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Eater, Subway Sect, X-Ray Spex, Alternative TV and Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers. There was also backstage footage of certain bands, and Sid Vicious’ first appearance with the Sex Pistols, at The Screen On The Green cinema, April 3rd, 1977.
 

 
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Fritz Lang explains how his meeting with Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Mad Man of Nazi propaganda, made him flee Germany the very same day.

Director of Metropolis and M, Lang had been called to see Goebbels over his undisguised attack on Hitler in his 1933 film, The Testament of Dr Mabuse - which the Nazis had banned. Instead of the expected interrogation and inevitable incarceration, Doctor Goebbels offered Lang the unexpected position of Head of the National Socialist Film Studios. Goebbels explained that both he and Herr Furher hoped the director would accept. Goebbels then offered his advice on the ending of The Testament of Dr Mabuse, which he had found unsatisfactory. Instead of Mabuse going mad, it would have been better if the mobs had destroyed him with their wrath.

It’s a good story, even if the facts don’t add up. One that’s worth retelling - just to hear Lang build up the dramatic tension with his powers of descriptive narration.
 

 
A mockumentary in the style of an alarmist propaganda film, The Devil’s Toy, directed by esteemed Canadian director Claude Jutra in 1966, uses the beginnings of the skateboard explosion to satirize and critique society’s fear of youth culture. Dedicated to “all victims of intolerance.”

“Beware, the youth of the world is on the move and their aim is to take over!”

In addition to making salient points about the generation gap, the film is beautifully photographed.
 

 
Via Mondo Film:

In 1978, Anger re-cut his landmark 1954 film, Inauguration Of The Pleasure Dome by several minutes as well as changing the score of the film he had previous selected, “Glagolitic Mass” by the Czech composer Leoš Janáček. This re-constructed version, offered here today features Anger’s choice of the 1974 Electric Light Orchestra album, ‘Eldorado’ as score. This edition of the film would be labeled by Anger as his “Sacred Mushroom Edition.” Anger successfully screened this E.L.O. version of the film at the 1978 Boston Film Festival. This festival exhibition would be the only time in history this version of Anger’s film had been seen, until now.

ELO’s Eldorado concept album about the fantasy life of a “Walter Mitty”-esque character seems an old choice for a soundtrack to such a beautifully evil film, I must say. Interesting, to be sure, but I can see why Anger orphaned this in favor of the classic version of the film.

This feels a bit like the Giorgio Moroder scored and colorized version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to me. Maybe I’ve just seen the classic Pleasure Dome too many times.
 

 
Thank you kindly, Brian Butler!

 
What is believed to be the world’s oldest color film footage, has been discovered by the National Media Museum, in Bradford, England. The footage was only discovered by chance, in an old film tin, when the Museum relocated its archive.

The film was shot in 1902 by Edwardian photographer and chemist, Edward Turner. Together with his business partner, entrepreneur and race horse owner, Frederick Marshall Lee, Turner patented a 3-color-film process in 1899, and filmed London street scenes, a macaw and his 3 children playing with a goldfish in the family’s back garden. This was the first color film process, long before Technicolor in 1916. Unfortunately, Turner’s method, which involved recording successive frames through red, green and blue filters, then projecting and superimposing them one on top of the other, at 48 frames per second, proved to be unworkable, and left the images blurred.

Turner died in 1903. His invention and films were soon forgotten, until now, when the National Media Museum used digital technology to transfer the imagery and have now made it available for viewing.
 

 
Via the Daily Telegraph
 

David Lynch - describing the one that got away?
 
Confidence has nothing to do with David Lynch’s endless supply of ideas. He credits meditation for that. It helps his ‘ideas flow through like these beautiful little fish, and you catch them,’ as he tells Miranda Sawyer, in this interview from The Culture Show in 2011.

The interview is loosely anchored around the release of Lynch’s album Crazy Clown Time, and bobs around various subjects before fading out on Lynch’s flow of ideas.

Going by how long the likable Ms. Sawyer is on screen (compared to Lynch), this interview has been heavily edited. Perhaps because Lynch rambles? Or, is he too intelligent for BBC viewers? Or, more likely he wasn’t giving the Beeb the sound-bites they required - which is always an issue with interview packages like this.

And note also, there are no cutaways of Mr Lynch, or any shots of the great man pottering about the beautiful Idem Studio in Paris, where he was working last year. Still, these are minor quibbles, as Lynch, with his Jack-Nicholson-on-helium voice, and Stan-Laurel-grimace, is always watchable and never less than interesting.
 

 
FILMography is a cool site where movie stills are placed within their original film locations, and then photographed.

The theory is: ‘FILM + photography = FILMography.’

This delightful site is curated by writer, journalist and photographer Christopher Moloney.
 

 

 
More Filmography, after the jump…
 
With thanks to Robert Coupée and Anne Billson