Tuesday, February 18, 2003

Marilyn Monroe in an early instance of cinema minima. A Boy's Film of a Day With Marilyn Monroe. A lovesick 8th-grader's home movie of an encounter with Marilyn Monroe in New York in 1955 was recently rediscovered. By Jesse Mckinley. He was 14, she was 29. He was a skinny, big-eared kid from the Bronx, she a blond bombshell from Hollywood. They said it would never work out, and sure enough, it didn't. But for one brisk day in the spring of 1955, Peter Mangone and Marilyn Monroe were in love. And he has the film to prove it. [New York Times: Arts] [cinema minima] 1:08:32 PM

Where old motion picture prints go to die. Ash Wednesday—I love this LA Times story about where old motion picture prints go to die—maybe into your next polyester garment! Old prints get chopped up and recycled into the most banal stuff of our material culture. So much for the art of film. By the way, the biggest source of bootleg movies during the 1960s were outfits exactly like the one described here, where they were supposed to be destroying the movies the Hollywood studios sent them, in that case, 16mm TV prints. But instead of making them into banjo picks like they were supposed to, they found a bigger market selling the prints on the sly to college kids like me. So much for integrity. But all this will one day be relegated to the scrapheap of history, since, at some point, probably sooner rather than later, 35mm film prints will cease to exist other than as objects of curiousity, replaced with digital copies delivered via wire, satellite or packaged media. [The Wednesday Morning Quarterback] [cinema minima] 1:04:50 PM